


put to death therefore what is earthly in you

by Margo_Kim



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Demon Sex, Demons, Dreams and Nightmares, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Exorcisms, Extremely Dubious Consent, Homophobic Language, Humiliation, M/M, Miscommunication, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Pining, Praise Kink, Rape/Non-con Elements, Shame, Slurs, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-19
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-02-17 05:05:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13069737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: Tomas lets a demon in his head, and it gives him what he wants. Marcus and Tomas try to do right by each other in the aftermath, without ever asking each other what "right" is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is all I have been thinking about since we learned that Tomas' demon temptation is Marcus telling him how cool and competent he is. Warnings for demonic consent issues, demonic homophobia and homophobic slurs, and demonic unpleasantness.

Marcus looks good. Better after sleeping. He's lost a bit of that sharpness—no, not sharpness, Marcus is always sharp, angular, but when he's tired, he's jagged. Less like a knife, more like broken glass. He loses his hilt, and the hand clasps the blade. But he looks better now, after resting, and he tells Tomas he feels better. Rests a hand on his shoulder and says, "Thank you for taking care of me."

Tomas smiles, and Marcus smiles back. It's like when the sun cuts through the clouds in such a way that the light becomes visible, lines of pure warmth, the sky's honest halo. When he was younger, Tomas thought that light was God, was literally God, before he went to seminary, learned the theoretical and the theological, the words of the Lord and the words of the men of the Lord who tried and failed to speak for Him in their best and worst intentions, and forgot for a while the sky.

Then Marcus drove them through big sky country on their travels west, so they could exorcise a young boy who'd slaughtered the livestock of his parents' farm.

The boy lived. The demon left. The family asked Tomas and Marcus to leave as well, and they slept that night some twenty miles away in the flatbed of their truck. It had been ages since Tomas had gone camping, if you could call this camping, parking off the side of a straight empty highway and listening to music played through Marcus’ seemingly indestructible tape deck. So maybe that wasn’t camping. After all, Tomas had never enjoyed camping, and this—this he wanted to do every night for the rest of his life. Here was the glory of God, in the multitude of stars and the chill of the night air, all the brighter and colder because of the heat radiating from man beside him. They shared constellations and the last of their beers. At one point, Marcus laughed and while laughing rested his head upon Tomas' shoulder, and without thinking, Tomas rested his cheek on the top of Marcus’ head. And they paused like that. Perhaps Marcus was also wondering if this was them tipping over into something new, or also realizing that this is what happiness felt like. Perhaps Marcus was thinking nothing at all.

After a beat, they moved. They passed the bottle between them. They slept without touching. Even with the cold.

In the morning, Tomas woke to sunlight piercing his eyes. And blinded by the sunrise, half panicked, half euphoric at the terrible grandeur, Tomas thought, _I see You. I see You_.

Marcus' smile has a terrible grandeur too familiar. There's a commandment or two about thoughts like that. But Marcus is not God, and Tomas does not think that for even a moment, any more than Tomas thought God was a sunrise, or the last swallow of Marcus' proffered beer, or the glancing weight of Marcus' laughing head on Tomas' shoulder. This is not the temptation of idolatry; these are the markers on the path to God, who is infinite, who is everywhere, who is everything. He chooses when He wants to be seen. Marcus smiles like God wants Tomas to remember Him.

Tomas is not sure what that means.

"You're good at this, you know," Marcus says. "You're going to be better at it than I ever was."

Tomas drops his head, afraid to let Marcus see the joy that must shine from his face. "Thank you. Everything I do, is because you've taught me."

Then a hand on Tomas's chin. And Marcus raises Tomas' head to look at him, and he does not remove his hand, and he says, "God chose you. God chose you for greatness, Tomas. I should thank you for letting me be with you here, at the beginning of your path."

"I—I—" Tomas says, as Marcus lowers his hand, his touch, his fingers brushing the pulse pounding in Tomas' neck. "I've made mistakes. I let a demon into my—"

"I've let demons into me," Marcus says. "It happens. Why do you think I was so mad?" His fingers trace Tomas' jawline. Marcus watches Tomas shiver through half-lidded eyes. "It's dangerous because it feels good. They're good at that, demons. Making you feel good."

"It doesn't feel good," Tomas murmurs. He feels as if he's drunk; he feels that way with Marcus often enough that you’d think he’d handle it better. Marcus is closer now, closer than he was before, and Tomas doesn't remember him approaching, doesn't ever want him to step back. He's high off the proximity of his body, and the finger tracing the shell of his ear.

"It does," Marcus says. "You did it because it felt good. To beat a demon on their own ground. To do what I never could. It only feels bad when you're done. That's why you never stop doing it." He leans forward, his breath so hot against Tomas' ear it feels like he's panting flames. "Sinning's the fun part, isn't it? It's the repentance that’s the bitch."

"Marcus." Tomas' hands ball in Marcus's sweater, to push him away, to pull him closer, to keep him exactly where he is, the temptation almost but not quite succumbed to, the inches of distance of plausible deniability. But Marcus is hot, so hot; without touching Tomas, Marcus still burns him. “We have to—Marcus, the exorcism, we have to—”

“We did, Tomas,” Marcus says. “We did.”

And they did, Tomas remembers that now, driving the demon out of Andy while Marcus slept on the couch downstairs. The children celebrating while Andy embraced them all. Harper looking to Tomas without fear, just joy—he might have killed her, in his pride, his arrogance, his surety that he knew better than Marcus, but he hadn’t, and Tomas had saved the day alone, and Marcus stood in the doorway, arms crossed, a soft smile on his face as the sunlight wreathed him in holy fire—

And they are in the guest bedroom of the house while the family plays outside, or maybe they’re off the island, or they’re getting dinner, or they’re gone, just gone, because Marcus and Tomas are here, alone, and so close. This is the room where Rose sleeps, and Rose is not here. The two of them are unchaperoned, Tomas thinks as a nervous giggle bubbles out of him.

And Marcus looks at him.

And Tomas does not know what his face is trying to say.

And Marcus asks, “Do you want to kiss me?”

It’s worse, it’s so much worse that he asks. There would be a simplicity in simply kissing. In Tomas’ too, too numerous fantasies, Marcus doesn’t ask and neither does Tomas. They don’t need to. They should understand ( _that to ask makes it real, to concede makes you complicit, they would turn passion into premeditated sin_ ) each other too well to need that ( _Tomas wants it to be real, he wants to ask and acquiesce and demand and give and give and take and give, he wants to know where his suspicion comes from that touching Marcus cannot possibly be a sin. He suspects it is from God, but he’s let too many things into his head lately)_.

Marcus says, “I asked you a question, Tomas.”

When Tomas doesn’t answer, can’t answer, can’t think of anything except how he promised he wouldn’t do this again, defile his vows and the person he’s with by breaking his vows with them, can’t think of anything except how Marcus’ touch has never felt like defilement, Marcus drops his hand. He takes a step back, or tries to. Tomas catches his hands before he can. There is his answer to himself, how bravery comes to him before the moment of loss.

“Yes,” Tomas breathes.

Marcus’ face is perfectly still, and the thought occurs to Tomas in the same way a chill occurs to the body if one is dunked in ice water: Marcus did not say he wished to kiss Tomas. Only that he wished to know if Tomas did. And now he is saying nothing, doing nothing, just standing there, his hands limp in Tomas’ sweaty grasp.

Was this a test? Had Tomas failed?

But Tomas does not let Marcus’ hands go. Nor does Marcus pull away. They are tipping, Tomas feels it with perfect surety this time, into something new.

Then Marcus smiles, and it burns so brightly it must be the light of God. “So kiss me.”

To exult God in rapturous joy is to press his lips to Marcus’, which are hotter than Tomas ever imagined. It’s a light kiss at first, a toe dipped in the ocean. It is soft as a dream. Tomas has dreamed of this, has dreamed of slow dancing with Marcus while the band plays only for them. Marcus’ hands still hang in Tomas’—they squeeze, and he squeezes back.

Then Marcus shifts, and snatches away all slowness, all softness.

Marcus’s hands hot on his throat, gripping so tight Tomas nearly chokes, and Marcus groans into Tomas’s mouth, “You taste so good, you taste so sweet.” The praise churns in Tomas’s gut like fire, and Tomas groans back, and Marcus swallows the sound along with Tomas’s breath, his thoughts, his hesitations.

Tomas whimpers, “Marcus,” and Marcus swallows that as well as he pushes Tomas backwards. The bed feels so good underneath him, almost as good as Marcus feels on top of him, impossible weight and heat like his body is made of iron pulled right from the fire. In Mexico, the sidelines of the football match, Tomas was twelve years old and his best friend’s brother told him that faggots go to hell where they are tortured for all eternity by demons who shove red hot pokers up their filthy assholes.

When Tomas flinches, Marcus hold his head tight and does not cease his kissing as if he will not allow the movement to derail what has been so long coming. This is good, good. Tomas does not need to apologize, to explain, and he wouldn’t know how to do either, does not know why the ugly words of an ignorant child come to mind now, except that Marcus is so hot on top of him, and Tomas is the shameless faggot the boys who hated him accused him of being.

“Wait, wait,” Tomas says, pulling away enough to whisper the words against Marcus’s lips. When he dreamed this, he dreamed it sweet and slow, he dreamed the kind of touch that said it was something more than lust, more than broken vows for his throbbing cock. He dreamed there was a way, though he’d never found it before, that sex might feel like God’s blessing, without sin or shame.

“We’ve waited enough,” Marcus whispers back, and Tomas can’t argue with that either. He wants this. God forgive him, he wants this. He has always wanted too much. He wanted Jessica, wanted glory, wanted to banish demons with a wave of his hand, but it has nothing on this, nothing on Marcus’s steady hands undoing Tomas’ belt, nothing on Marcus’ steady teeth scraping Tomas’ lifeline. _Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault_ , Tomas’ heart rejoices as it beats against his chest.

Marcus pulls down Tomas’ pants and says, as if he were remarking upon a clever dog, “Look at you,” and Tomas flushes and hardens with aroused shame, shameful arousal, the two emotions so intertwined beneath Marcus’s amused gaze that Tomas could not pick them apart in all of God’s eternity. He feels foolish, clothed but bare as Marcus straddles him fully dressed. Tomas has not even removed his collar, has not even unbuttoned his shirt. He raises his hands to do so, and Marcus pins his wrists to the bed. “Look at you,” Marcus says again and looks at him. Tomas is so hard he wants to cry.

“Marcus, please,” he says, and Marcus smirks, and Tomas closes his eyes because the sight feels the same as Marcus’s weight on his wrists: a sensation so white hot that Tomas can truly not differentiate between pleasure and pain.

“I like you begging,” Marcus says. Tomas cannot close his ears to that. “You’ve wanted this for so long.”

“Yes, yes,” Tomas pants, humiliation heavy as lead in his lungs. This is confession, wicked confession, the horrible satisfaction of listing sins like posts on a bedpost. The shame that comes before the absolution.

Marcus’s hands tighten on Tomas’ wrists as he grinds their hips together, and scrape of rough denim against Tomas’ bare, aching cock rips a keening plea from Tomas’ throat. “Por favor, Marcus.”

“You’re good at that. Good at begging.” There’s laughter in Marcus’s voice. “I bet you’re used to getting everything you’ve ever asked for.”

He flips Tomas onto his stomach and spreads his thighs with enough force to bruise. Tomas shudders and thrusts back against Marcus, against nothing, rutting the air as his cock drips precum onto the guest sheets. Tomas does not say, _I’ve never done this before_. He can tell by the way Marcus strokes the curve of his ass that Marcus knows. Tomas does not say, _Be gentle_. He does not want gentleness. He wants pleasure to scour him raw and clean.

“This is a sin,” Marcus mutters without shame, as if the thought is all the more alluring than this act could ever be condoned. He does not offer what Jessica offered, what she thought Tomas needed and what only drained the pleasure, not the sin; he does not take the collar off. He is never just a man; wishing cannot make it so. Jessica didn’t realize that sin hurts less when it hurts at all, the pious satisfaction of suffering as you do wrong. Tomas thinks of all those holy men and women across the centuries mortifying the flesh— _let me be one of you_ , he wants to tell them. _I love God in all my weakness, I love the vessel He fills, I beg Him to fill me with His Light beyond my body can endure_.

Marcus offers Tomas not indulgence from sin but his hand, pressed to Tomas’ lips, which part for the copper tang communion of Marcus’s fingers. Tomas lathes them with what individual worship he can offer while Marcus finger fucks his mouth. His other hand scratches the nape of Tomas’ neck, right above the collar. On all fours, Tomas feels like a dog, like a bitch in heat. Marcus weaves his fingers through Tomas’ hair and tugs, until Tomas is nearly bent double backwards and Marcus can nip his earlobe and say, with horrible softness, “My good boy. Tell me what you want.”

“I want—” Tomas tries and nearly chokes on Marcus’s fingers. Marcus pulls them back, just enough to brush their spit-covered tips against Tomas’ bruised lips. “I want you,” those lips pants.

Marcus doesn’t move. “Want me how?”

Tomas squeezes his eyes shut. “Make love to me.”

Marcus laughs, and it’s such a strange sound, such a cruel sound that Tomas jerks out of his grip, falling forward onto the bed, and Marcus falls with him, his weight heavy on Tomas’s back. “No, Tomasito, no. Tell me what you want.”

But that is what he wants, that’s what he’s wanted for so long, a way to make the way Marcus warms him into a physical exultation. Marcus doesn’t seem interesting in warming him right now. He wants them to burn, and Tomas burns with the thought. “Fuck me?” Tomas does not mean for it to come out a question.

“Again.”

Fingers press against Tomas’ entrance, where no one in his abbreviated sex life has ever touched him, where he’s only cautiously probed himself in the shower of cheap motel rooms, his other hand clasped over his mouth so he does not wake Marcus sleeping just on the other side of the door. He hasn’t imagined it like this, but he has imagined it, God have mercy, how Tomas has imagined it, and that he’s here, that it’s happening but not happening, it nearly makes him sob. “Dios, fuck, please, Marcus, fuck me, please, please fuck me,” Tomas pants.

Then Marcus presses in, and it’s too much, too fast, and not enough, not at all. One finger, two fingers, such a strange invasion done so fast that if Tomas had not experimented himself, he could not have borne it. He barely bears it now. _Lube,_ he thinks, _they should have something_ , before he hears the obscene wetness of Marcus spitting on his spare hand.

Tomas never finished writing his last sermon, the one so thoroughly derailed by the Rances, by the demons, by the Pope, by everything. What had it been on? Ephesians. God’s glory, received. _That he would grant you_ (“Tell me you want this,” Marcus murmurs) _according to the riches of his glory_ (Tomas can hear the soft rasp of skin on skin as Marcus strokes himself) _to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man_

(benediction is Marcus pleasuring himself to Tomas—Tomas will never deny this man anything)

 _That Christ_ (“yes”) _may dwell in your hearts by faith_ (“yes, Marcus, I want this so much”) _; that ye, being rooted_ (“say it again, Tomas”) _and grounded_ (“I want nothing so much as you”) _in love may be about to comprehend_ (Marcus shifts) _with all the saints_ (Tomas closes his eyes) _what is the breadth_ (Marcus pushes) _, and the length_ (pushes) _, and depth_ (pushes) _, and height_ (stills) _;_

(“Relax,” Marcus teases, as Tomas seizes, every part of his body tensed in the face of this agony, ecstasy, this misplaced stigmata. He is pinned and speared. This is not how he imagined. This is pain and pleasure and pressure beyond endurance.)

 _And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled_ (Tomas pants, “More”) _with the fullness of God_ (and Marcus says fondly, “What a good boy.”)

Tomas is crying. That is what you do in the face of something so much bigger than you. Tomas prostrates himself before the headboard and gives himself to God.

“Confess, Father,” Marcus hisses in his ear. “How often have you thought about this?”

Tomas can’t answer, he can’t, can’t manage any noise more coherent than the gasps of pleasure fucked out of him with every thrust. He can barely hold himself up with both arms while his cock hangs heavy and neglected between his legs. When he tries to reach for it, Marcus grabs his arm and twists up behind Tomas’ back. “I asked you a question. How often have you thought about being fucked by me?”

“Every night, every night. Marcus, touch me, please—”

“And how often did you do something about it?”

“I can’t—”

Marcus shifts his hips, and Tomas’ vision goes white, pure white, and Tomas thinks oh, oh so this is the prostate he’d tried in halting vain to find in himself, yes, this explains quite a lot of sinning, if sin feels like this, and Marcus asks, “Did you abuse yourself, Father? Hmm? Qué te va?”

Tomas’ cheeks burn, and he is amazed there is still embarrassment to be drained from him as he says, “Si, si, dios perdoname, muy a menudo, casi todas las noches.”

“English, Padre. How will I understand you?”

He flushes all the harder, feels all the stupider for doing so. “Yes, Marcus, yes, I did, yes, it wasn’t enough, it was never enough. Please, God, please touch me.”

Marcus thrusts again, hits that same spot, laughs as Tomas wails, and says with merciless affection, “No, Father. You’re going to come on my cock or you’re not going to come at all.”

The answer seems to be not at all. Marcus teases so close to what Tomas needs, and then backs off, fucks him until Tomas feels he’ll tear in two, then slows until Tomas begs him to move. Marcus doesn’t fuck like a chaste man. Marcus fucks as if now that he is inside Tomas, they have all of eternity, not one night but entire span of damnation. _Oh Tomasita, muy bonita, muy piadosa,_ his memories whisper in their ugly little voice, _la inglesia no te salvará. Maricas siempre arden en el infierno._

“Fuck me, Marcus,” Tomas grunts, and Marcus laughs, says, “Aren’t I doing that already?” and Tomas says, “Harder, harder, harder,” as Marcus acquiesces, and Tomas thrusts back, and his arm is still twisted up behind his back, twisted and more twisted as Tomas loses what little control he still had in the face of Marcus’ methodical onslaught.

Tomas’ climax doesn’t feel good. It feels like a cracked tooth finally pulled, the gangrenous limb finally amputated. It is relief more profound than pleasure. The relaxation at last of your body when it can stand no more to be tense, blood rushing out to warm you as you die of hypothermia.

Marcus pulls out and lets Tomas go. Tomas collapses face down, and he is so tired, so weak, that for a long moment he forgets that he must breathe. It takes the last of his strength to turn his head out of the pillow. He cannot see Marcus, cannot hear or feel him. It would almost be like he had never been there at all, if Tomas could not feel his seed dripping out of him. He tries to cry out and finds he has no words left.

“Shh, shh,” comes from the side of the bed Tomas isn’t looking towards, and weight settles there, and a hand settles in Tomas’ hair. “Calm down, Tomas.” Marcus sounds amused. “God but you were gagging for it.”

Tomas tries to say something like fuck off but can’t get the words from his fried brain to his broken mouth. He tries to tell Marcus to knock it off. There’s something about being on the other side of an orgasm that makes Marcus’ words sound meaner.

“You weren’t built for chastity, were you?” Marcus strokes Tomas’ sweat-soaked hair before he pats the back of his neck. “Me neither. I ought to send Bennett a fruit basket for finally getting that damn collar off me. Send him something anyway.” Marcus tugs at Tomas’ collar so that for a moment it chokes him. “Feels like a noose, doesn’t it? Gets you free refills at the odd cafe, but not nearly the respect it used to scare up. Being a man of God used to mean something. Now it’s just empty Masses and people making jokes about what you get up to with the altar boys.”

Tomas shivers. He’s freezing now, his clothes so wet with sweat that it’s as if he went swimming in them, and Marcus sounds sharp again. Jagged.

“You could make the church mean something again,” Marcus says. “Go back to Chicago. Tell them you want that big fancy church after all. They’d give it to you. Look at you, Tomas. Who wouldn’t give you anything you asked for?”

Tomas struggles to sit up. But his arms shake, and Marcus’ hand resting on his back seems so impossibly heavy. “You don’t want me to stay with you?”

“I could come with. I’ve heard good things about the rectory.”

“But our work, the people who need us—”

“Sure, we’ll still help them. You’re a powerful exorcist, Tomas. Shouldn’t take too much time out of your schedule. I’ll drive you out where you need to be, you’ll send the demons scattering with a wave of your hands.” Marcus’ voice drops the way Tomas so loves to hear it drop, like Marcus is telling a joke for Tomas and no one else, not even God. “You can show me how it’s done.”

“It is God's doing,” Tomas says, and Marcus says, “Only for exorcists too weak to do it themselves.”

Tomas closes his eyes and for a moment, a moment he knows he will wish could last longer, feels nothing at all. The moment of breaking through thin ice must be a numb shock, when the steady ground splinters and suddenly the world is in an instant not what it was before. It is deadly and you are drowning, and your body forces upon you in the account moment of crisis a terrible stillness not unlike acceptance, in which you may press your hands against the underside of the ice and wonder what happened, what you’ve done.

This time when Tomas sits up, Marcus does not stop him. Or cannot. His hand is still on Tomas’ back, his lower back, where Marcus has so often graced his hand to guide Tomas or comfort him or tease him or simply, Tomas has always hoped, because Marcus took the same pleasure in touching that Tomas took in being touched. “This is not real,” Tomas says through numb lips.

He makes the mistake of opening his eyes, of looking as he always does to Marcus, and the thing that looks like Marcus looks just like Marcus, purses his lips, squints, and cocks his head just like Marcus, except Marcus never looked at him like that with his pants still undone, stroking his penis back to hardness.

Tomas jerks his gaze away. “This is not real.”

Marcus’ voice says, “It feels real. Doesn’t it, Tomas? So much more real than your sweet little dreams.”

“Unclean spirit, I cast you out—”

“You can’t even cast yourself out of the bed.” Words formed through an audible sneer, and when Tomas flinches away, tries to stand and falls, hobbled by his pants still pulled down, hits the hardwood floor that isn’t really there, and burns with shame, the demon laughs, he laughs like Marcus laughs but crueler, and Tomas wonders how he could have been so wicked and stupid to have kissed that mouth.

Tomas staggers to his feet, fumbles his way dressed, cracks his dry lips. “In the Name—the Name—” and the words drop from him as the demon laughs again.

“You want me so bad,” taunts Marcus’ mouth. “You didn’t think for a second, and now you’re trying the righteous act on? You think God wants a cocksucker’s mouth wrapped around His words?”

“It is he who commands you, he who—”

“Not even a cocksucker, though.” The thing that wears Marcus’ face wears a musing expression upon it, and it is so familiar that Tomas nearly throws up. “An aspirational cocksucker. And a wannabe exorcist. Quite a resume you’ve got. I’m sure Marcus is very impressed.” The thing that is not Marcus smirks with Marcus’ mouth and uses Marcus’ hand to run Marcus’ thumb over the head of Marcus’ erection. “Come on, love. I promise I’ll tell you how good you’re doing. That’s all it takes, isn’t it?”

“Get out,” Tomas hisses. “Wear your own face, you filthy, unclean thing.” Tomas made his mistakes, Tomas committed his sins, he’s committed sin beyond measure upon the body of his friend, but with a fury purifying in its clarity, Tomas cannot allow even the image of Marcus’ flesh to be so defiled. Not for Tomas’ weakness. Marcus will never deserve that, and Tomas is unworthy to see what he has dreamed so long of seeing.

The demon tuts. “That sort of attitude isn’t how you make first Mexican Pope, Tomas.”

This is not real, and this is real, and this is Tomas’ head, and he has defeated demons from the inside before. “I command you, unclean spirit, whoever you are—”

“You know who I am, Tomas,” the demon uses Marcus to say. “I’m what you want.”

Tomas can no more shut his eyes than he could shut his ears. He forces himself to hear the poison, to let it drip upon his open eyes as Marcus, half naked, not Marcus, touches himself and laughs. “By the mysteries of the incarnation, passion, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ—”

“I didn’t offer anything you didn’t want.”

Tomas wants a crucifix and this is his head so now he has a crucifix that he brandishes towards the creature which, hissing, falls back. “By the descent of the Holy Spirit—”

Not Marcus lunges forward, nearly snapping his teeth on Tomas’ nose if Tomas hadn’t caught him in the chest. “I didn’t give you anything you didn’t ask for,” he hisses in Tomas’s face, his breath the putrid smell of sick and death and long decay.

Tomas holds him off, holds the crucifix to his neck and reminds himself that this is not Marcus who writhes. “Obey me to the letter—”

“I did, you stupid faggot—”

“ _I who am a minister of God_ —”

The demons makes a sound from Marcus’ mouth that Tomas realizes with grim satisfaction that Tomas has never heard before. “God doesn’t want you.”

“Despite my unworthiness—”

“Marcus doesn’t want you.”

“I command you, minion of hell—”

“Whore,” Marcus’ mouth but Marcus’ mouth bleeding, rotting, hisses. “Why would I ever want you? Kiss you, fuck you? I know where your mouth’s been, I’ve already pulled it off one demon’s cunt. How many times does Tomas Ortega have to go to his knees before he learns how unworthy he is?”

Tomas’ grip falters, just for a second, and the demon lunges.

It’s funny, in a humorless sort of way, that Tomas’ first thought at the hand seizing his throat is how often Marcus has cupped him here, both palms cradling Tomas’ neck like they held some precious, fragile thing. Sometimes Tomas’ head has felt too heavy for his tired bones, has hung so heavy with exhausted terror that Tomas cannot lift it from his chest or the pillow or the windowsill or Marcus’ shoulder, and Marcus’ hands anointed with his own generously offered blood as much as Christ’s would lift Tomas’ head for him, and Marcus’ tender lips would in their tenderness make achingly soft whatever words he’d use to tease Tomas falling asleep on the job.

Tomas is used to drawing strength from Marcus’ hands. The demon can use them to choke the life but not the spirit, nor the Spirit. God is water that fills Tomas’ cupped hands; Marcus holds his wrists steady. The demon and Tomas are both unclean things, but one once laid prostrate before the cross and swore to more.

“God is in me,” Tomas exhales, and the demon who is not Marcus, too cruel and petty a thing to ever be Marcus, sneers and says, “He fuck you too?” And Tomas invokes the power of Christ who flows through his vessel to smash the demon against the wall, and Tomas raises the crucifix once more, and Tomas does not think of how his body, his imagined dream of a body, aches from the imagined violation of Marcus’, and the demon snarls, and Tomas thinks, _Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault,_ and asks God for time. Before him is the adversary who cowers before the cross. Let him defeat this evil in the name of the Lord, in the name of Andy Kim who loves his children and loved his wife. Let Tomas do this now, whatever the cost, and when the work is done, he’ll kneel before Marcus once more and beg his forgiveness.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Despite sharing Tomas’ apartment for weeks, despite the long forced intimacy of Casey's exorcism, Tomas first saw Marcus’s body truly bared after proximity and weariness ground privacy to dust. It started with Tomas thumbing a yellowed collection of well-loved romance novels while Marcus chatted up the neighbors at a garage sale across the street from the house of a man who had been acting funny lately. Marcus charmed two old ladies into telling him ten years of gossip on the street; Tomas spent fifty cents on a copy of an acrid smelling pulp called _Riding at Midnight_ , thoroughly read until the book naturally fell open to the page where the square jawed hero Jackson Wyoming shares a passionate kiss with a woman identified only as Kitty.

After four weeks on the road, Bennett had finally found a hell they could do something about. The man who lived across the street from the sale of romance novels was possessed. His name was Kyle, and it had taken the work of an afternoon and night to drive the demon from his body. The demon had held Kyle with a loose fist, and Marcus had batted him away like a prize fighter wasting his time on a neighborhood drunk. Tomas had stood back, clutching his Bible to his chest with a strange shyness. This was his second demon, and it was tormenting with desultory cruelty a family he did not know, a family that barely wanted the two of them. _What am I doing here?_ Tomas had thought. _What aid can I offer this man of God?_

 _You are a man of God too, hijo_ , said his abuela's voice, but as poor a student he might have been, he was learning not to trust the voices that whisper just to him while a demon stared him down. Marcus would not be as forgiving of weakness, Tomas was sure, the second time around.

Marcus led the call and response of saints, and Tomas replied, "Pray for us," his voice cracked and dry as he swallowed around nerves that swelled up his throat. Kyle's body on the bedroom floor shrieked. Tomas wondered if they heard it across the street at the garage sale.

Then the demon was gone. Kyle curled up on the floor, weeping with his head the crook of Marcus's elbow, as Marcus swept his hand down Kyle's back and said with utter certainty, "You are forgiven. You are forgiven."

They left town that morning, a little after sunrise. Kyle's brother made them coffee for the road and told them they could keep the travel mugs. _Don't come back_ was rarely delivered in such diplomatic subtext. Tomas had not expected how little people wanted exorcists to stay. The neighborhood priest gets invited around to dinner; the strange tired men who torture evil out of your loved ones stink up the house.

Tomas offered to drive, but Marcus said, "You're knackered, I'm not."

"You're tired too."

Marcus waved him off. "I'm good tired. You'll drive us off the road."

Tomas almost said something like, _I did nothing to help you exorcise the demon, at least let me drive. Let me be useful_. But even in his head, it sounded petulant, and Marcus was right. Tomas could barely keep his eyes open. Such a short exorcism, such a short ordeal that Tomas had largely watched, and he felt drained beyond his capacities.

 _What am I doing here?_ Tomas thought as he settled into the passenger seat.

They wound up at a motel a few hours away, one with an empty room they could collapse in right away. Tomas took the bed by the door and tried his best to settle down upon it as it he could have easily kept standing another day more, if he had needed to. Marcus tossed his bag on the other bed and said, "You mind if I shower first?"

"Please," said Tomas, because Marcus deserved it and also because Marcus had not yet changed out from the clothes he'd performed the exorcism in and Tomas had spent enough time with him to know how rank holy work could smell.

Marcus smirked like he'd heard that thought and peeled off his sweatshirt as he walked.

Tomas lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The water started to run, the pipes protesting as they did; their screaming nearly drowned out the sound of Marcus humming. Both were strangely familiar sounds. Marcus hummed as he thought, as he drew, as he dressed in the predawn light of cheap motel rooms like this as they got ready for another day's drive chasing another lead that was nothing at all. Marcus would have done well in a choir, one of those community ones that let anyone in. Not because Marcus wasn't a good singer. He had a fine voice whatever he sang, and he sang everything if you left him alone long enough, blues, bluegrass, ballads, even the occasional hymn, though those he sang with uncharacteristic shyness and only when he could pretend that Tomas wasn’t listening. Marcus loved music with a gifted amateur’s knack, and music seemed to love him back. Tomas could spend fifteen minutes fiddling with the radio and finding nothing but static and sermons, which both agreed wasn’t what they wanted to listen to in their free time. Then Marcus would give the knob a twist, and some half-forgotten legend would sing a neglected classic as if just for them. Music followed Marcus and nestled inside him and lit him from within. His God really was a woman wailing with a guitar.

(Not that Marcus didn’t have significant gaps in musical knowledge, namely anything younger than a decade old. Here is a memory in which the shape of heaven could be found: Marcus speeding through Arkansas twenty miles above the speed limit, singing at the top of his lungs his best guess at "California Girls” as Tomas giggled helplessly in driver’s seat, the liturgical matter they'd been arguing so thoroughly forgotten that they'd argued about what they'd been arguing about for the next hour.)

Had Marcus ever been in a choir? Tomas couldn’t imagine. What little he knew of Marcus’ past was tragic and tired and transitory. There was no choir of traveling exorcists (at least as far as Tomas, still in training, knew). And it was hard to imagine Marcus in any formal setting for singing. He would hate any group fancy enough to have standards. The choir of St. Anthony’s, for example, took anyone who could mostly commit to weekly practice, including Mrs. Ramirez who cheerfully trilled through whatever octave and pitch she pleased. If people didn’t like her singing, she said they could sing all the louder to drown her out. Marcus would have liked her. Probably would have egged her on.

This was not the first time that Tomas has considered Marcus at St. Anthony’s, not as a colleague lurking in the back pews while he waited for Tomas to finish up, but a layperson, a man, come to worship. He'd worship best at a church without airs, without pretension to earthly class above spiritual grandeur. He'd come to church early because he drove his elderly neighbor there and flirt with her wildly as he did. He'd stay behind after service to help clean up while she talked to her friends. He’d read the community bulletin board like the newspaper and get roped into coaching a child's sports team when no one else volunteered. He'd make sure there were plates and utensils at the potlucks. He’d confess mundane sins in the musty black box they stored cleaning products in and in which Tomas had once napped while avoiding the bishop, and when Tomas told this to Marcus, Marcus would laugh and ask if that was proper priest behavior. Tomas would have spent a lot of time denying to himself that Marcus was his favorite parishioner.

It didn’t matter. There was no St. Anthony's anymore, and Marcus, who saw God at twelve, did not need spiritual guidance from Tomas, who had seen only the shadows of His shadow.

The sound of water rose. Tomas' eye opened as the door did, and a surprisingly robust billow of steam rolling out as Marcus did. He was wet, shower wet, which was different from sweat wet or rain wet, both of which Tomas had witnessed. Just for starters, both had involved more clothes and fewer hand towels barely looped around hips.

Marcus ignored Tomas as he dug in the strange backpack he favored and, judging from appearances, had stolen from a particularly derelict army surplus store. Tomas had been too tired to ignore him in turn. There was a code to being men like this, in the constant proximity of other men. There wasn’t privacy, but you pretended, either that it wasn’t happening or that no one cared that it was. At the very least, you didn’t stare.

When Marcus noticed Tomas staring, he pulled out his cassette player and waggled it. "Forgot this," he said.

“Ah,” said Tomas in an approximation of a normal tone. “You almost had ten minutes without B.B. King.”

“It’s Etta at the moment,” Marcus who was mostly naked said. “Better to drown out my warbling.”

“I like your warbling,” said Tomas to Marcus who was mostly naked.

Marcus who was mostly naked looked as if his grin had been surprised out of him. “Then I’ll warble all the louder.” And he turned back into the bathroom, and Tomas added knowledge of Marcus’ bare back to his new knowledge of Marcus’ bare front. Scars were the main topography of the land. Scars and freckles. He was crisscrossed in latticework of survival, and his legs were longer than Tomas had realized, and what was wiry in clothes was wiry without except in the way a live wire was. Dangerous. When Mary Shelley imagined how man might attempt the usurpation of God to make life, she imagined electricity. Marcus looked like the lightning bolt to the mangled flesh.

Behind the bathroom door, no doubt using up all the hot water, Marcus harmonized with Etta, and indeed sung louder than he had before. On the other side of the bathroom door, picking up Marcus’ abandoned sweatshirt and folding it neatly upon his bed, Tomas quietly measured the memory of the pale line of hair that had started at Marcus’ naval and added it to the total quantity of freckles on Marcus’ shoulders and calculated the how likely it was that he had once again fucked up.

 

***

 

Tomas wakes in a closet to a woman's disapproving face. If this is a metaphor from God, it is perhaps too on the nose.

He nearly laughs before he vomits instead, and the woman, disapproving as she may be, rubs his back as the sickness comes up. "You must be Father Tomas," she says when he's done, half sprawled on the floor and emptied out and continuing to retch all the same. "Can you stand?"

He appreciates her asking that rather than if he is okay. He can answer her question. "Yes."

She stands and offers her hand. It takes all her weight to lever him to his feet, and once there she doesn't let him go as he sways. “Marcus—I need to find—forgive me, Marcus, I need to—I'm sorry—” Tomas cannot say the words. He can't stop speaking either. He can’t even say what language he’s speaking. It's another mercy from the woman when she interrupts him.

"We'll find Marcus," she says. "I imagine he needs us." Her eyes flick over him as if calculating exactly how much use he could be: this pale, listless, heaving man so drenched in his own sweat that his shirt clings to him like skin. With a detachment that must be some cousin of shock, he wonders if the sweat disguises that he came in his pants. It should, he thinks, but you can hardly ask a woman that before you get her name.

This time he does laugh, and he vomits again. That there is nothing to come up does nothing to calm his stomach. There is something deeper than food that his body desperately seeks to eject. There is a rot at the heart of him, the house cannot stand.

"Shit," says the woman. Tomas concurs.

"Don't tell him," he mutters through lips that feel too thick to close. "Mea culpa, lo siento.”

"Tomas, where is Marcus?" she asks urgently. "He's in danger, we're all in danger."

Her words are stern as the cock of a gun. Tomas tries to rest his hand against the wall for support. He is so sweaty, his grip slips right off. She catches him, having never let go. “The woods,” Tomas says. “I saw him. Through the demon’s eyes.” Marcus was choking, dying, and it was Tomas’ hand killing him, or Andy’s hand, or neither hand as they stood apart and watched. Tomas shakes the image away and is rewarded with not peace but nausea. "The demon is gone. I made it go."

 

 

Correction, he adds a moment later, begging forgiveness of the sin of pride as the woman named Mouse half carries him from the closet: God made it go. And Andy, with a baseball bat which Tomas could respect as an alternative to a crucifix. Andy placed his faith in the bat. Andy, who had locked the ugly history of the island within him that it would die within him. Tomas found him when his fight with Not Marcus turned, and some spindly thing wearing the scraps of Marcus' skin scuttled off to the attic.

When Andy saw Tomas, his mouth quirked in a hint of a smiling that must have been heartbreakingly bright in some kinder world. "Yeah. I kissed her too. Slipped me tongue and everything."

Tomas does not tell this part to Mouse. Or maybe he does. He hardly knows what falls out of his mouth. His lips won’t stop slipping open.

She asks about Marcus and Tomas must say something useful —the woods, out the back of the house, the cabin where he held the kids, where the thing that held him held the kids, then further back, follow the prints in the mud—because she gives him a look that makes him feel like bug pinned for examination. But she must find him wanting for she says next, “We’re finding you a place to lie down, you’re not fit to walk.”

Tomas takes special pains to think about nothing in words. It is not as hard as it should be. Exhaustion has ground Tomas’ brain to perfect smoothness. All he can think is the reek of sex and the feel of rust as she opens the door to the guest room. “I’ll bring him to you,” she says as she pushes him onto the bed.

 _Marcus’ hands on his waist, lips on the back of his neck, their bared skin pressed together like hands in prayer, and Marcus whispers,_ so good, so good for me, oh love, _and Tomas wept at the words. Marcus worships through music and here is the Song of Songs—_

But that is not what the demon offered—what Tomas asked for from the demon. It is what Tomas would have asked for if the demon had concealed its nature a moment longer. It is a sketch that Tomas has labored over for months now, that the demon allowed him to paint in full color.

_(Tomas had sat beside Andy on the stairs of the house that wasn’t the house in whoever’s mind they were trapped in—Andy’s, Tomas’, the demon’s—and he told Andy, “I will kill this thing.”_

_Andy said, “Good.” He nodded. Tomas nodded back. And Andy said, “I need you to tell the kids some things for me.”_

_And Tomas said, “Tell them yourself.”_

_And Andy said, “Oh, Father.”_

_“I’m not killing you,” Tomas said. If he stood for Christ in that moment, it was the Christ whipping the money changers out of the temple. “I will kill this unclean thing and you will live.”_

_“As nice as that sounds,” Andy said, “she’s stronger than you, she’s stronger than any of us. You’ve already tried exorcising her, it didn’t work. I kill her and she comes back stronger.”_

_Andy’s face is wan, weary; Tomas has no patience for it._

_“The Lord is my strength,” said Tomas. “And I will strike this evil down.”)_

These are the sheets Tomas gripped as Marcus—not Marcus—fucked him. They felt softer in his head.

_(“She’s too strong.” Andy’s words creaked as much as the planks of wood warping under their feet. The demon was twisted the house around them. It wanted them to think it wanted to play a game._

_“It is hiding,” Tomas said. “That is not strength. It is afraid.”_

_“Or sadistic.” Andy managed to cock an eyebrow. “I vote sadistic.”_

_“Jesus was fully human and fully divine,” Tomas said. “Sometimes we are two things at once.”_

_“So your pep talk here is that the demon is both desperate because it feels threatened and intensely cruel.”_

_Tomas returned as best he could the fragile smile Andy offered. “Call it a sermon.”)_

The bed smells nothing like Marcus. Jessica’s bed had smelled like her and Tomas and the combination of them together and her laundry detergent and her shampoo. This bed smells like dust and rot. All things in this house do. Perhaps it’s Tomas that reeks like putrid flesh, and carries that rankness with him wherever it goes, and blames everything for its source but him.

You are not supposed to hate demons. You are not supposed to hate anything, hate is evil is the lack of something inside of you is unchristlike behavior for any Christian, least of all a man who vowed to stand in place of Christ in this world. And, says the books that Marcus teases Tomas for reading before he goes through and marks the important bits for him, you make particular effort to not hate demons. They were angels once, and are of the same high holy making of angels still; to hate them is to hate the work of God. Marcus, after four decades of expelling demons from their innocent hosts, may hate demons. He hasn’t told Tomas either way. If he hates demons, he loves the possessed more. “You saved me, bringing the Rance family. I nearly killed Casey,” Marcus confessed one late night picking at a gray and shriveled dinner as they stood at a sad sink in a sad kitchen, during their third possession on the road. It was the hardest one yet, an elderly woman with no family left and a demon that made her believe they’d come back. Her body barely survived the exorcism; Tomas doubted she would live much longer. She’d fought till her fire was nearly burned out. “I got desperate. After Gabriel—I thought God’d come back to me, that I could make myself right to him. And then.” Marcus looked away, and Tomas could not tell if he was trying not to cry or if he always had tears in him and sometimes they shone brighter than others. “Maybe Mother Bernadette believed it was mercy for Casey. I was after revenge.”

There was silence after that, Tomas prodding weary vegetables, Marcus finishing his plate with the grim determination of a man who couldn’t trust food would always be there. “We’re not demon hunters,” Marcus said as he wiped his mouth. “We’re exorcists.”

“What is the difference?” Tomas asked.

“The difference is,” and Marcus stared Tomas down and made sure that he heard the words, “if there’s ever a choice between saving the person and killing the demon, you save the person.”

_(“Kill me,” Andy said as the paintings melted, the faces of the children Nicole had loved so fiercely in life, “and she’ll die with me.”_

_Tomas braced himself against the door the demon no longer needed and said, “Andy, I cannot do that.”_

_“Do it,” Andy said. “Do it. Let me fix what I’ve done.”_

_“You’ve done nothing but love your family.”_

_“I’ve killed.”_

_“It killed.”_

_“Through me. I let her in, I hurt my family because of it,” Andy said. “Please, Tomas. This is my mistake.”_

_Tomas said, “It is my mistake too,” and if Tomas had thought better of himself, he might have found it sad and holy that two good men argued they each should die as from the blackness in the floor emerged figure, a body, black tar and white eyes.)_

The door downstairs slams open, and footsteps pound, someone running, taking the stairs three at a time, and Tomas has just enough time to think, _Mouse has forgotten something, Mouse has returned_ , when Marcus bursts through the doorway and shudders to a halt on the threshold at the sight of Tomas sprawled on the guest bed.

_(“Take me, take me,” Tomas shouted at the demon, and he thanked God for nothing else than that the demon wore Nicole’s face as its too wide mouth smiled and said, “Again? Gladly.”)_

Tomas thinks, it’s possible I passed out a minute there, and he also thinks, he wouldn’t look at me like this if he knew, and he also thinks, God help me, please, he shines more beautiful and bright than my corrupt spirit and a demon’s vanity could copy, and he also thinks, God help me if he embraces me on this bed.

“Tomas,” Marcus croaks and runs to him.

Tomas manages to sit up before Marcus wraps him up in his arms, his stubbled face pressed Tomas’ neck, his familiar hands clenched in the Tomas’ shirt. And Tomas knows this weight, this heat, this smell. This is the grave Tomas wishes to be buried it.

Tomas stiffens like a corpse, and so does Marcus before letting him go, leaning back and still too close and still too far. They sit on the bed and their knees bump. Worry is plain on Marcus’ face. Everything is plain on Marcus’ face. He wears his bleeding heart as jauntily as his hat. Tomas knows that. It’s something he thinks about often when he imagines them together, how pleasure might shine from Marcus’ face like blinding sunlight, how Tomas could take his unavoidable pride in coaxing out the sun. Marcus is an honest man no longer bound by the priesthood; he could flourish in joy without shame. The demon taunted him about Peter, and Peter was the man who had traveled with Marcus the other day, and the morning after, Marcus had smiled and pressed his fingers to his lips when he thought Tomas wasn’t looking.

_I didn’t give you anything you didn’t want. I didn’t give you anything you hadn’t begged God for every night._

“Are you okay?” Marcus asks, his hand coming up to cradle Tomas’ cheek before he remembers that he had stepped away. Touch is an instinct for Marcus. It is how he works and soothes. The pleasure Tomas takes from it is no different than that of the man at the mall rubbing himself through his pocket as he watches a mother breastfeed.

_(The demon pinned Tomas once more, in a more honest torture, and vomited itself into Tomas’ screaming mouth. And as the world constricted to the horrible pain, the eternal demonic loneliness and rage and bitter endless hatred, Tomas held to his plan—to wake, to hold to himself just long enough to throw this mortal frame through the nearest window. Tomas took a vow to stand for Christ and failed, repeatedly failed, failed through pride and lust and wrath, but martyrdom was another grand Catholic tradition, and one that offered Tomas the wannabe exorcist the only path he could take._

_The difference between martyrdom and suicide was often a thin line. A demon wearing Marcus’ face had once reminded him of that as well._

_Then the pain stopped, or rather it remained but ceased to accelerate towards the impossible agony he had been hurtling towards, an agony so far beyond human comprehension that Tomas couldn’t manage to fear it. And the demon was off him. And Andy stood over him with the same baseball bat Tomas had seen him knock the demon away with before, and the tip of the bat tapped against Tomas’ forehead._

_“I’ll kill him,” Andy said, his bat poised over Tomas’ head. “If it means killing you.”)_

“I’m fine,” says Tomas, knowing Marcus won’t believe him. “How is Andy?”

_(“Murderer,” the demon hissed, and Andy tightened his hands on the bat in agreement.”)_

After a pause, Marcus says, “Asleep. Scraped up. I dragged him to the cabin where he was holding the kids, tied him up there.” He nods at Tomas and smiles, a tentative offering. “Dragged you too. You’re heavier than he is, by the way. Like trying to push around a dwarf star.”

Tomas cannot look at Marcus anymore. “You didn’t need to restrain him. The demon is gone.”

_(Demons are smart. They have nothing but time to think. They are good at odds._

_The trick of an exorcism, Marcus had told Tomas once, is to make the demon more scared than it is mean. “God always wins,” Marcus said. “Your job is to remind the demon of that, and convince it to fuck off before God gets annoyed.”_

_The demon that was not Nicole and not Marcus looked at Andy, at Tomas, at Marcus out on that island coming towards them, at God’s patient undefeatable love in heaven, and had too smart and too scared a look in its eye.)_

“Just the same.” Tomas can tell from voice alone that Marcus’ smile is gone. “Thought we might take some times confirming that, after the cockup with the Rances.”

Tomas squeezes his eyes shut—yes, another failure, Chris MacNeil dead, the family terrorized again, Kat’s permanent, martyred limp—and says, “You’re right, of course. I’m sorry.”

Marcus forgets that he’s decided not to touch Tomas. With his hand on Tomas’ shoulder, Marcus tells him with urgent tenderness, “Nothing to be sorry for, love. You did good.” Marcus pauses, while Tomas prays. “I’m proud—”

_(Disappointment, crushing disappointment, and on the heels of that, the now familiar shame of failure. “I was willing to die,” Tomas said to Andy when the demon was gone, not dead, just gone, scared off, recovering, eventually returning._

_“So was I,” Andy replied wearily. “But I didn’t want to drag someone down with me.” Andy smiled at him, and the fact that the demon was gone made him look no less kind and no less broken. “Glad I didn’t have to kill you, Father. Shelby’d be so mad.”)_

“We should check on Andy,” Tomas says, and by the time the sentence is done, he’s on the other side of the room, pulling on his jacket like another layer can help. “He is the exorcist, not me.” He looks back, not at Marcus, Tomas isn’t brave enough for that, but in his direction, just enough that he can see Marcus’ hand still raised as if some invisible Tomas steals comfort.

Then Marcus’ hand drops, and he says, “Right. Let’s.”

 

 

Andy is sleeping under Mouse’s watchful eye and crucifix, which she has left resting upon his chest. His face is clean of the filth and blood that’s been caked on for the last interminable days of miserable exorcism. Mouse washed him with holy water. “The demon is gone,” she says to Marcus while looking at Tomas.

Marcus falls to his knees beside Andy and touches his cheek precisely the same way he did not touch Tomas. “Good man,” Marcus whispers to Andy’s still face.

Tomas sits on a tree root across the room and draws his legs tight against him.

They make plans. Mouse will stay with Andy until he wakes. If he decides to flee across the border, she's the best equipped to help him do that. She’s good at sneaking, apparently. (She looks wryly at Marcus and says, "Don't make a church mouse joke," and he smiles at her with horrible warmth and says, "You're the one that kept the name.") She'll handle the bodies in the meantime. If Andy wants to turn himself in—and the three of them already know he will—she can see what she can do with the crime scenes to strengthen the inevitable insanity plea he'll have to chase.

"Just have him tell the truth," Marcus says, with what is not quite humor. "That should do it."

Marcus and Tomas will meet up with Rose and the children on the mainland, then leave before the police get wind of them. They can't stick around for a testimony and trial, no matter what help they could offer the Kim family. The amount of time it would take aside, Marcus is still officially blamed by the Vatican for the assassination attempt on the pope, and neither Mouse nor Marcus trust Tomas to lie to the police.

(When Tomas does not reply to that, Marcus says, "I really thought you'd at least look offended."

"I seem to have the least experience here lying to law enforcement officials," Tomas says. "I thought I should leave it to the experts." Marcus rewards him with a laugh, and Tomas goes back to not speaking.)

After that, very soon after that, Marcus and Tomas will pick up Bennett from the hospital in Spokane Mouse left him in after he got stabbed. ("Again?" Marcus says when Mouse informs him of this, with more surprise in his voice than concern. "That's out of character."

"For who is getting frequently stabbed in character?" Mouse asks, and then says, "You," at the same time as Tomas says, "Him," and Marcus scowls a scowl that isn't a scowl, a bit too much like a smile. How nice this moment might feel, if Tomas did not soil every good thing in his life.)

Once they have Bennett, they figure out the plan from there. The church is compromised all the way up to the top. Every exorcist associated with the Vatican is recalled or being hunted down. They might have allies. They might not. At the moment, they are alone.

"But we've got a new weapon for the war," Mouse says and looks at Tomas.

"He's not a weapon," Marcus says.

"He's a bomb you're trying to use as a surgeon's scalpel," Mouse says. She's right. Tomas feels poised to explode. It seems inevitable that he will burst into tatters and debris. "He drove out an entrenched demon who'd been tormenting this island for centuries, and he did it on his own."

"God did it," Tomas says, less out of a desire to speak than annoyance that they’re discussing him as if he is not here.

"God chose you," Mouse counters.

Marcus says nothing.

"I strengthened Andy. That was all." Tomas looks away from the both of them. They're both too clever to trust them with his face. "If anything, he saved me."

Even now, Tomas has the monstrous instinct of envy as Andy, still unconscious but looking better than he has in the entire time Tomas has known him, rest with his head in Marcus' lap. God forgive Tomas, he cannot think about Marcus' lap, or how he wishes his own head lay there. The time when he could have pretended only the desire of tactile comfort from a friend is over. In his weakness, he has made sensual every chaste wish.

"False modesty is its own kind of pride," Marcus says cautiously. "You did good, Tomas."

"He did," Mouse agrees.

Marcus' look for Mouse has a personal kind of regret. Tomas would examine it closer if he wasn’t trying very hard at the moment to forget the demon’s every word. "That doesn't mean we see what we can do to him until he breaks."

"I will serve God as best I can," Tomas says. He looks at Andy's face as Marcus' unconsciously smooths his hair. "As far as it goes."

Marcus’s thumb traces a cross on Andy’s forehead. Andy—thank You, God, Tomas can still offer, thank You, God, for saving this good man—lies untroubled and still. "We'll discuss this later," Marcus says, which Tomas knows means not in front of Mouse. Tomas feels the weak child’s pleasure at being included. "I don't fancy getting arrested again."

 

 

Andy doesn’t wake up before Tomas and Marcus leave the island, and they don’t have time to wait. The police have already started searching for Andy, and they don’t know if Rose told the cops that two priests were with him. As Tomas gets their things, Mouse and Marcus exchange words and keys—her car is on the mainland, theirs is on the island, and it’ll be easier for them to sneak off without having to bring it with them. They’re standing close, less than a foot apart, their heads bowed together as if in secret, desperate prayer. They draw apart as Tomas walks towards them. He wonders if this is how he and Marcus look together. He wonders what the demon meant when it spat at Marcus about her.

“We’ll talk soon,” Marcus says to Mouse. Mouse nods, her eyes darting back to Tomas like she is already planning her arguments.

“I’ll be in touch. Tell Bennett to get stabbed less.”

Marcus grins. “I’ll pass it on. I’ll say it smug, just like that.”

Mouse smiles back at Marcus, who smiles more because she smiled, and as long as Tomas is feeling unchristian, he indulged in the thought that he had expected the priesthood to feel less sometimes like high school bullshit.

Because he does not know what else he could possibly convey to him through Mouse, Tomas asks, “Will you tell Andy ‘thank you’ for me?”

Andy, who hugged Tomas’ shaking body as he said, _I didn't know, I didn't know_ , and Andy said, _I know, trust me, I know_. What selfishness it had been, to demand Andy comfort him at a moment like this. To say, _Andy, good man, child of God, I understand that you watch helplessly as a demon crawls through your intimacies and tortures those you love most with your own body, but I asked nicely for that same demon to fuck me, and it felt good. Comfort me, for it felt good_. Tomas was back again to crying on Angela Rance's couch about how he's never seen God while a demon twisted its claws in a good woman. Has Tomas ever helped anyone without demanding help in return? Has Tomas never offered, only exchanged?

Tomas worries Mouse or Marcus will ask, Thank Andy for what? Neither do, and then it’s time to leave the island.

 

 

It started in Tomas’ dreams, when a man of God faced down a demon and wept for a child and Tomas thought, this is what the priesthood ought to be. It started at St. Aquinas, when Tomas stepped stuttering over the threshold of Marcus’ cage and first felt the burn of him. It started in Tomas’ home, the lock useless and the fridge raided, and Marcus weeping again for a lost child the world had failed. It started when they stared down a demon together. It started when they didn’t die doing so. It started when Marcus stopped sending him away, and when he started asking Tomas along. Tomas had not realized how badly he wanted to be asked along.

It started in the cheap motel room, when Marcus, who Tomas likes to imagine sings Etta just for him, at last came out of the bathroom wrapped at least in a larger towel, and as Tomas headed to take his turn in the shower, Marcus grabbed Tomas’ arm, and he said, “You did fine last night, you know.”

“I did nothing,” Tomas said, and Marcus replied with a mischievous smile, arguably the only kind Marcus has, “Don’t fish for compliments,” and squeezed his arm and sent Tomas off to the showers, where with the willful ignorance of a reformed sinner who wishes to relapse, he jerked himself off to the thought of nothing at all. Nothing but the feel of a hand gripping him tight.

With Jessica, what woke him at night was the thought of her thighs squeezing his head, the sweet nectar of her on his lips, and then the tightness, the white hot wet heat of her as he thrust in, her head falling back to expose the perfect column of her neck, and there he would kiss her, dream of kissing her, dream of making that perfect skin with mouth and teeth like a child with a paint can so everyone would know that he, that Father Tomas Ortega, had died here, along tendons of her neck, between the rhythm of her thighs.

He dreams of kissing Marcus with a closed mouth. And then, after drawing back a moment, when Marcus's head is bowed so that he may look at Tomas through his lashes and the light of a challenge or maybe a plea shines unspoken in his eyes, Tomas succumbs, as he knew he would, and leans in again and kisses him again with his lips open just enough. Like a door cracked open to suggest that if someone wished, they were free to walk in. Marcus would hesitate before his hand cradled Tomas' head. Marcus' mouth would open like a muttered prayer.

Slow, slow—Tomas paints them coming together so achingly slow that it gives his conscience time to catch up with his passion, his libido, his perversion. Jessica at least wanted him, told him that she wanted him, invited him to want her too. His thoughts of her are no less a sin for it, but when he looked at her with lust in his heart, she looked back in kind. Marcus looks to him as a partner, a friend, and Marcus is not the kind of man who has many friends. Neither is Tomas. Friends don't do this to each other, don't take their weakness of their soul and shape it around the form of their friend. Confession is good for the soul, but confession would mean Marcus would stop sprinkling affection over Tomas like powdered sugar, sometimes the only sweet thing in Tomas' day.

For six months, he has been so lonely in the passenger seat of their dusty truck. Whenever they switched drivers, Tomas would always sink too deeply into the heat Marcus left behind.

Tomas has picked every scab he's ever had. Don't think, he commands himself, but cannot keep from finishing the sentence. Don't think about Marcus not in that bed across the room but this one. Don't think about the warmth of his skin when he touches you. Don't think about how stubble might scrape against your pulse. Don’t think about his fingers in your beard. Don't think about it. His fantasy, the one he fails to not think about the most, is almost comically chaste. It’s the kind of fantasy Tomas imagined the priests of his childhood to have: the simple longing for touch. In it, Tomas comes back to the hotel room and there is only one bed. And Marcus lies on one side of it, the side furthest from the door, and Tomas comes over and lies on the side closest to the door, and Marcus teases him about letting the cold in, and Tomas smiles and leans forward and—

A particularly hard squall hits their ferry, and Marcus manages to sound annoyed as he retches over the railing. “No more exorcisms on bloody islands,” he mutters, and Tomas, despite himself, laughs. But he does not rub Marcus’ back, does not offer the comfort of touch that he knows Marcus thrives on like a plant in the sun. If Marcus asks, Tomas would. Tomas prays Marcus will ask, or even just grab Tomas’ hand and put it where he needs it to be. Since Tomas flinched in the guest room, Marcus has not touched him at all.

They stand together and outside of each other’s reach.

 _Tell me what to do,_ Tomas prays to God and Marcus, _and I will do it._ Both subjects answer him with silence.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my word count for this chapter in my outline was "3k words max" and here I am with nearly 7k because I am *finger guns* a creature of wordiness and pure id and also season two finale did mean I had to rearrange some shit THANKS GUYS. comments are lovely, and I'm very bad at responding to them, but they brighten up my day so much and I truly appreciate them.


	3. Chapter 3

A few days after the incident with the Rance demon and the Pope—which is a hell of a sentence, even for Marcus—Bennett met Marcus in the alleyway behind St. Anthony’s and passed him a crisp paper bag full of crumpled bills. Five thousand dollars cash, courtesy of the Vatican. The first investment in Tomas’ education.

“It looks like you’re trying to frame me for robbery,” Marcus said, rolling up the bag and tucking it underneath his arm.

“You killed a man on a parade route,” Bennett said wearily. Weariness probably more due to blood loss than Marcus, Marcus liked to think. “Why would I need to frame you for anything?”

Marcus shrugged, took another drag on his cigarette while he kept an eye out for Tomas, who had only recently found out that Marcus smoked and seemed determined to nag the habit into oblivion. “You’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” said Bennett. It almost sounded sincere. Bennett had sounded very sincere when he’d taken Marcus’ confession and pronounced him forgiven of murder. The greater good demanded it, after all. God wanted blood on Marcus’ hands. When Marcus had washed them clean in the wake of the chaos, the biblical significance was only slightly undercut by the fact he was washing them in the bathroom of a sandwich shop that went all in on the novelty pig decorations. “The Church will thank you for what you’ve done.”

“Yeah, well. I’ll not hold my breath waiting for my collar back.”

Bennett raised an eyebrow, as only Bennett could. The sight of it felt like a ruler across Marcus’ knuckles. “I didn’t think you wanted it back.”

“It wasn’t theirs to take.”

Bennett didn’t say anything to that, just let the silence be his answer. After a moment, he said, “I thought you would be enjoying the freedom.”

“I kept my vows. All the ones that mattered. I was glad to keep them.” Marcus dropped his cigarette, ground it out with his heel, remembered that Tomas would scold the hell out of him if he found it. As he knelt it pick the butt up, he said, “What about Tomas? Is he in danger?”

“Do you mean of losing his vocation, his life, or his soul?”

“Give me the odds on all of them.”

“There’s no immediate danger of excommunication, neither from his work with you or his personal indiscretion.” Bennett paused before the last two words and then delivered them with a weighty significance so heavy they fell from his mouth like lead. Bennett was not one for toleration of indulgence. He couldn’t be, not with the position he held against a legion of demons skittering over his exorcists looking for every crack. It was also a matter of personality; even if he hadn’t been in the Church, Bennett would have worn his shirts buttoned up to the chin. “He’ll be under the auspices of the office of exorcisms. But perhaps deep, deep down in the personnel files. As for the other two—” He glanced at Marcus, and promptly found him wanting. “I imagine that’s up to you.” And then, after a moment’s consideration, “And him, of course.”

“Of course,” Marcus replied dryly, and Bennett looked at him dryly and finished his own cigarette.

After Bennett left, Marcus spent bought a shitty old truck in cash and spent the rest of the day wandering around the city. It was autumn, late autumn, and the wind whistling up the streets smelled of snow. A good time to leave. Winter always dried Marcus out. Cracked his skin, wore his knuckles red, made his mouth taste like he was sucking pennies. It made him feel back at home, the oldest home he'd most thoroughly left, on the edge of that dark forest with the tired angry people who made him. Cold grey days always threatened nostalgia. Marcus sought out the unfamiliar to settle himself, and spent twenty minutes watching a group of school children play underneath the weird metallic bean art installation.

You are in Chicago, the sight reminded him. You are in Chicago in the fifty-third year of your life, and you have found a friend.

That was one way to put it. Marcus didn't feel like picking at any of the others at the moment.

He stayed out until the sunset, and then headed back on the now familiar route to Tomas' apartment. He needed a better coat, a better hat, any gloves, but he felt strangely good. Wired. He didn’t trust himself around Tomas in a mood like this, almost manic with imagination as he fingered the new keys in his jacket pocket. He'd take them south first Bennett had a lead in Georgia that seemed like the most promising place to start, and if that one didn't need them, there was another credible case in Alabama. Bennett had sent him half a dozen different cases that he could get started on—the exorcists who normally covered the field being suddenly unavailable, but that was Bennett's problem. Bennett was the one who wanted out of the field; Marcus had never dreamed of being a manager or a general. He was meant for the trenches. Marcus was like one of those deep sea fish he and Tomas had watched a documentary about the night before as they ate their takeout, the ones who died when you tried to pull them up out of all that crushing pressure. The church had sent him to Aquinas to die. He'd nearly obliged them. Thank God for Tomas, for the vision Tomas received, for God realizing him still had use yet for Marcus and sending Tomas to him. For letting him keep Tomas, just a while longer.

Georgia first, and then Alabama, and then there was another possible case in Kansas, too many cases and Marcus would have to show Tomas how to sort through them, how to prioritize which you follow up on, how you investigate if there's a possession, what you do if it's not. Tomas would probably take notes. Color coded for quick reference.

"Why are you smiling?" Tomas said crossly when Marcus let himself into the apartment (with a proper key, somehow more illicit feeling than lock picking ever was). Tomas' apartment looked the same as it did when Marcus left—a disaster zone of more sprawling proportions than the little apartment looked like it could hold. There were four mostly empty cardboard boxes labeled _donate, Olivia, trash, take,_ and around the boxes were Tomas' possessions arranged in the topography of a mountain range.

Marcus nudged a nearby hillock of bedsheets with his foot. "Shouldn't those be in the boxes?" Marcus, who had never had to clean out an apartment before, asked.

"They are being sorted to be sorted into the boxes.”

"Are they? Because they look to me like they haven't moved since this morning."

Tomas glared as he placed a pile of CDs next to the pile of dented pans. The look might have been more intimidating if he wasn’t still wearing his pajama pants and a shirt for an elementary school 5k. He cut the sleeves off the shirt, as he had for a surprising amount of his shirts, and Marcus took the moment to enjoy Tomas’ arms. They were good arms, strong and looking it when Tomas bared them. Marcus had spent plenty of time lurking around Tomas’ parish, listening to his flock gossip about their hot priest with pleasantly affectionate respect; there were several parishioners that would faint dead away seeing him like this now.

Now St. Anthony’s was to be no more. A lot of good people losing a good church. Marcus reminded himself that he was supposed to feel bad about that.

“Just put together some outfits, leave everything else,” Marcus said.

Tomas spread his arms at the upended room. “Leave it? Like this?”

“We’ll lock the door behind us.”

“I like my things. And I also like my landlady. She shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

“A shame.”

“You should appreciate her, she put up with you living here.”

“Visiting here,” Marcus corrected. “I slept other places sometimes.”

“You stole my bed!”

“It’s a good bed.”

“I know it’s a good bed, that’s why you stole it.”

“It’s still there,” Marcus said innocently and gestured towards the bedroom. “Look.”

“Marcus,” Tomas said so chidingly, that Marcus burst out laughing. “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you.”

“Liar.” Marcus could not keep the fondness from his voice. Tomas did not appear to even try to keep the fondness from his eyes. He was seated amongst the accumulation of his life, and he smiled at Marcus for taking him from it.

Tomas was not a man who demanded luxury, but he was used to comfort. A few months sleeping at Tomas' apartment, where everything had been owned first by several someone elses and all the fabric had the gossamer softness of long use, had made that clear. Tomas had more bottles of soap in the shower than body parts to wash and a showerhead that looked like the only thing in the house Tomas had upgraded when he bought it. His bed was indulgent, far from the stiff, cardboard feel of cheap motel mattresses, which were often just a step up from kipping in the tub. The couch was good too, if too short for a grown man to properly stretch, though the thought would have never occurred to Marcus a few years ago. He was getting picky in his old age. Time was he could have curled up in a dog bed and got a good six hours.

It was an alright truck that he had just bought. If Marcus was traveling alone, it would have been just fine. With two—

But Marcus couldn’t find guilt in himself when he pulled the car keys from his pocket and watched delight shine from Tomas’ face as if it were Christmas. “You got it?” Tomas asked, jumping to his feet and disturbing an already slumping slope of his unforgivably tight sweaters.

“The Church’s newest wheels,” Marcus said. “Bennett says try not to crash it.”

“I’ll make sure you won’t,” Tomas said, and laughed when Marcus rolled his eyes. Tomas thrummed with excitement. Marcus didn’t think he’d ever been that young. “Can I see it? Where is it? What kind of car did you get?”

“Finish packing,” Marcus said, “which you said you’d be done with yesterday, by the way—”

“I never said that, you told me that I would be and I said that was impossible—”

Marcus waved that off. “Finish and I’ll show you.”

Tomas looked down at his possessions, everything he owned, strewn on the floor around him for his careful consideration, and he scooped up as much as he could in his arms and dumped it in the box labeled _Olivia._ “She can sort it. I want to see our car.”

 

*** 

 

Mouse’s truck is better than theirs. None of the warning lights on the dash come up when Marcus turns the car on, and it doesn’t smell like diesel. Marcus adjusts the mirrors as Tomas buckles up and catches a glimpse of Harper’s face looking back at him as she wraps her arms around Rose. Marcus doesn’t turn around. He studies her face, the proud jut of her little chin, and raises his hand goodbye.

They need to leave before the cops arrive, and they’ve already told Rose what she should tell them. Bennett’s waiting in Spokane.

“You okay?” Marcus asks.

“Let’s go,” Tomas replies, which isn’t an answer.

Something’s wrong with him. Something’s been wrong since Marcus ran back to the house after watching, seemingly unbidden, the demon leave Andy’s body. Tomas, sweating and shaking on the bed, so pale that he looked like sheets his fists were balled in, muttering prayer with a feverish mouth. But alive. Still alive, and moving, responsive, nothing like the corpse that Marcus had prayed over and abandoned in a closet. Mouse— _Mouse,_ and there’s something to think about when Marcus has time to breathe—told Marcus he’d been sick twice, that he’d looked almost possessed himself but when she pressed a cross against his skin, he hadn’t flinched. He’d flinched when Marcus touched him.

“Let’s get you some food,” Marcus says as they drive.

“No, thank you,” Tomas replies, his eyes closed, head against the windshield, his legs pulled up onto the seat. He’s a large man who makes himself small.

“I’m not asking.”

Tomas says nothing. Marcus nearly reaches for him, gets as far as reaching a hand out before he remembers the tightness of Tomas’ muscles underneath his arms, how he’d leapt from Marcus and kept the space between them.

Marcus rests his hand on the gear shift instead.

Mouse’s car doesn’t even have a tape player, so it shouldn’t rankle so much that Marcus left his Johnny Shines tape in their truck anyway, but there’s nothing on the radio that Marcus wants to listen to, but he wants to listen to Tomas’ silence even less. So he turns on the news. There’s nothing about Andy. Small relief there. He hopes Mouse convinced him to run. Andy Kim is a good father, a rare fucking thing. He’s martyred either way—condemned in reputation if not flesh, and always carrying the memory of what his limbs did—but let him suffer in the free air, in the sunshine. Marcus prays for that mercy, at least.

When they arrive at the hospital, the nurse smiles and says, “It’s wonderful Father Bennett is receiving so many visitors from the church.”

“Isn’t it?” Marcus replies, and when she leave, he says, “Shit.”

“Do you think—” Tomas starts, then swallows whatever the rest of that sentence might have been. His eyes are wide with what looks like terror, a strange look for Tomas who, if anything, could stand to suffer terror more often.

Marcus starts walking towards Bennett’s room, and lets his movement be response.

Bennett is alone. But the room smells like rich cologne. Marcus spares a moment to rest his hand upon Bennett’s, feels the comforting warmth of life more solid and assuring than rhythmic beeps of the heart rate monitor, then he searches the room. There’s a fine layer of ash underneath the bed.

“They knew we were coming,” Marcus says when he stands, winces as his knees crack. Every part of him aches. “Left in a hurry. They couldn’t finish what they started.”

Tomas, lingering in the doorway, closes his eyes and slumps against the frame. Marcus can’t let him feel the same relief, not while Bennett is still unconscious and Tomas looks well on the way. He sits on the side of the bed, his back to Tomas, and nearly lets his head stoop before he realizes that if he lowers it, he won’t raise it again. Not for a while. “We’ll keep watch,” Marcus says. “In case they come back.”

“Alright,” says Tomas and nothing else. He’s been accommodating since they’ve left the island. It’s almost as unnatural as his fear.

He hears Tomas sit in one of the chairs by the doors, the ones that smell the most of that fucking awful cologne that reeks like old money. Demons love filth and high society. Marcus rubs one hand over his face and rests the other hand on Bennett’s chest. Stabbed, again. Poor man. He’d left the field after an exorcism gone right then wrong, the woman saved from the demon only to hang herself when the exorcism was done. She couldn’t live with what her body had done. Bennett had been one of the things her done had done, she’d nearly ripped his throat out, tried to gouge his eyes out, broke three ribs, snapped his arm in half. Left him too torn up to carry her body down from the rafters himself, though God how he had tried. End of Bennett’s field career that day. He’d called Marcus from the hospital, and Marcus had come pick him up.

Behind him, Tomas’ voice flutters like a sparrow wings in whispered prayers. The words are too soft to catch in entirety. It is their familiarity Marcus knows. Marcus knows the sound of prayer; Marcus knows the sound of Tomas praying. Tomas prays in Spanish soft as an exhale for Bennett. Marcus misses God with a ferocity that snarls in his father’s voice, but God will listen to Tomas. His prayers whisper in the ears of mothers and saints.

 _The happiest day of my life was the day you left everything for me,_ Marcus does not say. He does not say, _And now you will not look at me._

Something happens to exorcists eventually. A demon cuts too close to the truth, or the person dies, or God stops talking back. Sometimes all three. Most people, smart people, they stop being exorcists at that point. They die or they quit, and Marcus knows which he’d prefer for Tomas, who looks just like Bennett once did in that other hospital, after that other exorcism. Marcus knows he should thank God that Tomas is still alive at all, but he’s too tired for gratitude, and too tired to sob. Tears roll down his cheek, and he lets them roll, for a good man whose life is ruined and the children hurting because of it, the neighbors dead and Harper’s brave face, and Mouse who Marcus does not recognize, and Tomas who looks like Mouse, and Bennett still as a corpse as human ash dusts his hospital room floor.

Bennett sleeps, and so eventually does Tomas, his head leaned back against the pale hospital wall. His forehead frowns in worry, his hands clenched even in sleep. Marcus might think he was still awake if Marcus had not by now studied from the blind of long proximity Tomas’ every state. His mouth hangs open slightly, as it does when he sleeps, and the breath rushing between his lips rumbles with something gentler than a snore. His feet twitch. They’ll twitch like mad all through the night. On more than one occasion, when they’d slept in close proximity, Tomas spent half the night dribbling Marcus like a football in his sleep.

Marcus didn’t much mind. He’d slept rougher, and Tomas always smiled so bashfully about it in the morning.

Marcus goes out in search of a spare blanket and finds a night nurse, Jenny, who’s been turning a blind eye to their afterhours vigil at Bennett’s bedside. After a few minutes chat, she gets Marcus and herself a coffee from the floor kitchen, which they stir with their pilfered graham crackers. She tells him, “I prefer you two to the other priests.”

“Yeah?” Marcus replies.  

“Prettier to look at.” She says it like a joke, but her eyes search Marcus’ when she says it. Maybe she’s got a nose for demons. Maybe she just doesn’t like their cologne. “Your friend’s got in some trouble, to have a wound like that.”

“Suppose he did,” Marcus says.

She crunches her cracker, and studies the bloom of bruises Marcus knows must ring his neck. “You two look like you’ve been in some trouble as well.”

“Who hasn’t, these days?”

“His other friend, the woman, she left before the police could come,” Jenny says. “But the police are gonna come back.”

“Good to know,” Marcus says. “Maybe they can help with all the trouble.”

Jenny waits a moment, then shrugs. “Alright then. Don’t tell me anything. This is the problem with Catholics, you know, you’re all very secretive.”

“You not Catholic?” Marcus asked.

“Lutheran.”

“Well, that’s your problem.”

It’s nice, almost. A moment away from worry. Marcus had almost forgotten that they’d won. That Andy, whatever his future held, was alive and free for now, his body his own, his family safe. The demon cast out from within, through the strength of Tomas. Tomas, alive as well, not catatonic, not demonic, just sleeping, still, against the wall as Marcus drapes the blanket around him and tucks him in as best as you can tuck in a sitting person. Tomas’ face slackens when Marcus’ hands wrap him tight. Marcus lets his thumb trace the furrow of Tomas’s forehead, and where he touches, Tomas goes smooth.

“I am,” Bennett croaks from the bed, “the one who got stabbed.” He spares a moment to cough horribly as he fails to sit up. “You might lavish such attention upon me.”

“You don’t sleep as pretty,” Marcus says, beaming at Bennett’s side.

Even in his infirmary, Bennett manages to give Tomas’ resplendent form a look of scathing judgment that implies he considers the amount of facial symmetry displayed to be immodest and excessive. “Who does?”

 

With silent apologies and thanks to night nurse Jenny, they break Bennett out of the hospital. “Why are you two so good at this?” Tomas asks neither in particular as they wheel Bennett out a backdoor.

“You don’t know?” Bennett replies. “Marcus must be neglecting your training.”

“Shut it,” Marcus says with extra grumpiness because he suspects it’ll make both of them smile. It gratifies him that they do.

Bennett’s in no condition to be out and about yet, but as he’s also being hunted by the Vatican and demon priests, they’ll have to keep moving. Bennett takes a break from stoically pretending he isn’t in pain to rack his brain for his knowledge of the Pacific Northwest. “There’s a couple near Portland I’ve worked with before,” Bennett says.

“Portland, Oregon?” Marcus asks.

“Of course Portland, Oregon.”

“Because once you did send me to Portland, Maine.”

“I did not send you there, you misheard me and went there.”

“I asked you three times if you meant Portland, Oregon, and you insisted, no no, Marcus, you’re going to Maine—”

“Might you be wrong about this while driving?” says Bennett who is finally sitting comfortable and buckled in.

“Course,” Marcus says, turning the car on. “I’m only one here good at driving.”

Caught the rearview mirror as he sits in the insufficiently sized backseat, Tomas says nothing, just tucks his head down against his chest, and looks down again at his lap. His long legs fold up back there, and he makes himself, again, look small. He makes himself look small too often, and Marcus doesn’t understand how anyone, least of all Tomas, falls for it.

He let a demon into his head. Again. And looked dead, and been dead to the world, except for the creak of dry prayers coming through his dry lips like the only instinct left to Tomas was to plead with God. Marcus needs to remember to yell at him about that, for making Marcus think he was dead, for making Marcus think he was lost, for making Marcus think of all the things he would do if that was true and what he would do to make that untrue.

But right now, Tomas looks worse than Bennett, who inquires after Mouse and nods when Marcus fills him in. He tells Marcus about the state in Rome, and they compare notes on how fucked they are in the quiet tones Marcus imagines parents use when they don’t want to wake the child in the backseat.

The only mention they make of Tomas is when Bennett raises his eyebrows and inclines his head towards the silent priest curled in the back, and Marcus says, “He exorcised the demon by himself. Let him nap.”

If he expects some protest from the backseat, he gets none. And Bennett gives Marcus a look like, yes, well done. How well you’ve cared for your apprentice.

_“He has a family,” Bennett said as they smoked behind the emptying corpse of St. Anthony’s. “And his affair with a married woman is hardly a testament to self-control.”_

_“He fucked up, he’s learned,” Marcus said. “Demons won’t use that against him again.”_

_“Then they’ll use something else. He’s a good with a congregation. He’s what our Church needs, out in the community.”_

_“That’s not him,” Marcus said. “Trust me, Bennett. He’s an exorcist.”_

_Bennett fixed him with a stare as smoke curled from his lips. “Is he? Or do you hope he is?”_

Somewhere, Mouse with her gun murders demons and the human flesh that carries them, and Tomas opens wide to swallow the poison of demons whole that his human flesh may burn instead, and Marcus, who once thought he had anything to offer them, has not heard the voice of God for months. Marcus, who shot his father dead when he could have run.

 

The safe house Bennett knows outside Portland, Oregon, is an apartment owned by a polyamorous trio of lesbians, only one third of which laughs when Marcus asks who’s the mother, the maiden, and the crone. It’s the crone who laughs, and she’s a former nun it turns out. She also laughs when Marcus tells her that isn’t surprising. The other two are also former nuns, but with more immediate concern about Bennett’s reopened stab wound. Mary and Trish take him to the guest bedroom slash office which functions as an unlicensed free clinic. Billy helps Marcus blow up an air mattress in the living room. Tomas showers. He spends a long time in the shower, and when Marcus is beginning to wonder if he should go check on him, Billy says, “Leave him. Some things you gotta soak off.”

“Would you let him stay here?” Marcus asks.

"If he asks, I guess." Billy hands Marcus a bedsheet. “He won’t want to.”

When Marcus joins Bennett in the guest bedroom slash office slash emergency room for wayward priests, Tomas finally comes out of the shower, and Marcus gets the horrible thought that Tomas was waiting for Marcus to leave. This thought stays with him while he and Bennett make plans, as Bennett makes plans and Marcus, so tired he can barely think, nods every once in a while. Bennett wants to fight the Vatican. Fine. They still need exorcists out on the road. Fine. Bennett will coordinate with his resources he can still trust, and Marcus will keep on. Heaven’s foot soldier to Bennett’s general. Fine.

The only question Marcus asks is, “Will Tomas be safe in Chicago?”

“No,” says Bennett. “He may as well stay with you.” Bennett raises an eyebrow. “Didn’t you say he was an exorcist?”

Stab wound or no, Marcus feels no compunction leaving Bennett to Mary’s tender care after that.

The problem is, he gets back to the living room to find Billy and Trish on the air mattress, Trish already snoring, and Billy says to him, “I’ve already sent your boy to the master bed. You two look like shit.”

“I’ve slept on worse than that,” Marcus says, nodding at their sleeping arrangement.

“I’m sure you have, tough guy. And now you’re gonna sleep on a real mattress.”

The bedroom is pitch black when Marcus opens the door, and the sliver of light from the hallway falls on a king sized bed that seems to be empty but for a pile of blankets on the edge almost falling onto to the floor. The pile is Tomas, shrouded in his own blanket and huddled on the far side of the bed where it would be very hard for Marcus to accidentally touch him. His face is buried into the pillow. There is hardly an inch of skin showing.

Marcus closes the door until the golden arch of light narrows to a strip slicing across the wall. He kicks off his shoes, tugs off his jacket, and feels around with his feet for a clear spot on the floor. When he grabs a pillow from the bed and throws it down, Tomas finally speaks to him. “What are you doing?”

It’s carpeted, not bad. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

Tomas sits up, probably. What Marcus sees is darkness shifting in the darkness, and now Tomas’ voice sounds more muffled. “Don’t do that. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

“You’re already in bed.” _And you sleep poorly enough in places that aren’t your home. You need comfort, and that’s no shame. I don’t need comfort. Forgot that, for a while there._

There’s a pause and Tomas says, “Then sleep with me.”

Marcus wants to say, _you don’t want me to._ But Marcus doesn’t want it to be true, no matter how tightly Tomas’ body clings, to leave a canyon between them on a bed meant to comfortably serve three. So Marcus picks a coward’s silence, rolls up a blanket from the bed, and says nothing at all.

The darkness that is Tomas’ body seems to slump, and says, “Marcus. Please. I’m sorry.”

 Which settles that. Marcus has never known how to say no to Tomas. If Tomas is a test from God on resisting temptation, Marcus fails every time.

“Nothing to apologize for,” Marcus says, and puts the pillow back on the bed, and hesitates, and lies down. The bed is so large they may as well be sleeping separately. They’ve slept together before—slept in close proximity, Marcus means, never quite touching but close enough to feel the warmth of the other’s body. Marcus has never slept as well as he has when caressed by the faint breeze of Tomas’ breath. Here, lying as they are, Marcus could grasp as much as he liked and still not touch Tomas. But he can still feel the tension shaking off Tomas’ taut body, and knows therefore that Tomas must feel the tension shaking off his own, and they should talk about it, they should, but Marcus is so tired, and the pillow is so soft, and Tomas is shaking but he is alive, and when Marcus opens his mouth to ask what’s wrong, what’s gone so wrong, he’s already asleep.

And for a time he feels good. He remembers that. He feels good and safe and warm. 

Then Marcus wakes some eternity later in the middle of the bed to a sudden chill, a sudden emptiness as Tomas slides out from Marcus' arms and takes a blanket and pillow with him. "Tomas," Marcus slurs through lips too weary to open, grasps with limbs that in sleep had no difficulty grabbing what they wanted. 

"Go back to sleep," Tomas says softly, and spends the rest of the night on the floor, while Marcus sinks back down with too much ease into unconsciousness, alone. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks always to Amelia for listening to me groan about writing this chapter and for telling me to finally just sit down and write it. Also I've increased the total chapter count as I decided a few more painful things needed to happen before the end than I originally outlined.

Tomas doesn’t sleep. He curls on the floor at the foot of the bed in his borrowed pajamas, and he thinks until morning. Marcus sleeps, thank God. He needs the sleep. In Bennett’s hospital room, he’d looked no better than the invalid patient, yet Tomas had been the one to sleep then, and had awakened wrapped in a blanket.

When Marcus had moved to him in the bed, in his sleep, Tomas had been awake and he had let it happen and pretended that it was because he did not wish to wake Marcus, who settled against Tomas’ body with a sigh, his face buried in Tomas’ neck, his arm slung around Tomas’ waist. It would have been a simple thing for Tomas to turn his head and press his lips against Marcus’ forehead. It was almost impossible not to tangle his fingers in Marcus’ hair, to cup the back of his head as something precious, as Marcus would hold Tomas in his moments of weakness and doubt.

This much he allowed himself, indulged himself, this much sin he could not resist: Tomas rested his cheek against the top of Marcus’ head. It required almost no movement, just the faintest adjustment. You could pretend it was just a natural slackening of muscle on Tomas’ involuntary part as he went deeper into sleep.

He pressed against Marcus and prayed to God for mercy.

And Marcus had sighed again and settled deeper, until he was flush with Tomas, and his lips were open against Tomas’ neck, just the hint of wet heat in the gentle susurration of exhausted sleep. And his thigh pressed against Tomas’s thigh, and then another movement, and Marcus slipped his leg over Tomas’, all the better to get closer to him, until there was no air between them, no air in the room at all, and even if there was, Tomas couldn’t have breathed it as Marcus—always wired, always moving, always touching and meaning nothing, even in sleep—rocked his hips against Tomas and moaned.

No, no, that’s not what happened.

Marcus moved as sleeping people sometimes do, fidgeting for a more comfortable position, and he made a noise in his sleep as sleeping people sometimes do as well, and if Tomas thinks sex, that is because Tomas is Tomas and can think of nothing else. Not friendship, not comfort, not even warmth in a cold room, just of grabbing Marcus’ ass and grinding back, face pressed into Marcus’ hair as they rocked together, closer and closer and closer, until they came together as one, exalting each other’s name.

So now Tomas is sleeping on the floor. Marcus had woken as he fled, but he was asleep again now, face down in the spot Tomas had just left, not that Tomas is thinking about that. He watches the slice of sky where the blind doesn’t meet the windowsill, and prays numbly for strength as the last dregs of night lightened to full day. Tomas tries to count up the hours since the island, the demon, the horrible mistake. They add up to an eternity.

When they’d arrived at the hospital to the news that demons could be there, Tomas’ first shameful thought was, _they will tell Marcus._ Before anything else, before concern for Bennett, for the other patients, for the nurses, before the righteous desire to cast away the demons. Tomas’ first thought was that he must act to conceal his shame.

 _Forgive me, father_ , _for I have sinned,_ Tomas thinks for the ten thousandth time. He does not know how to finish the sentence. In the black box of the confessional, to a stranger, to God’s ear, Tomas might stumble his way towards the words. _I have had lustful thoughts_. _I have engaged in sexual relations with my dearest friend whom I have lusted over for months and whom I love improperly but it turned out to be a demon in my head_. _I have regretted only that the demon was not my dearest friend. I have not forgotten the feel of his touch. I have not ceased my lust._

Tomas might manage to articulate that. But the person who most deserves to hear the confession is Marcus. And for him, there are no words, none. Not in Spanish, English, Latin. There is nothing Tomas can say to Marcus. Shame loops around his neck like a noose, and Tomas pulls it taut until no words can come out at all.

He waits until he hears movement in the rest of the apartment to give up on sleep. He tiptoes out of the bedroom without defiling Marcus with his gaze and follows the smell of coffee. The air mattress on the living room floor is empty and squished, a sad deflated lump that Tomas should have insisted he’d take. But the women had been adamant, and Tomas had slept on the floor anyway. At least Marcus can enjoy the bed.

“Morning,” says the one who had been nursing Bennett when Tomas went to bed. Mary, Tomas remembers. She has a firm squatness and the close cropped haircut of nuns and butch lesbians, both of which Tomas has always found to be a comforting if stern presence. She points to a line of mugs and tells him to help himself.

“How is Bennett?” Tomas asks.

“Sleeping,” Mary says. “Trish is with him now.” She sips her coffee, black, and looks Tomas up and down with a too appraising eye. “How did you sleep?”

Tomas gulps his coffee in response. “Marcus is still resting.”

“Good.” They drink together in silence not quite comfortable. “Where do you plan to go next?”

“I—” Tomas has truly not thought about it. He has to leave now, surely. Or Marcus will send him away. But Tomas cannot go back to Chicago, not if that would endanger Olivia and Luis, and he doesn’t know where else he could go. He doesn’t want to go. “I don’t know. It is up to Marcus and God.”

“In that order?” asks Marcus from the doorway. He’s wrapped in a sheet that hangs from his arms like wings when he leans against the doorframe, and underneath he’s wearing his clothes from yesterday. He smirks at Tomas, but with too much gentleness, gentleness he wouldn’t offer if he knew Tomas’ heart, and so is unethical to receive. Tomas looks away, out the window over the sink. The silence in the kitchen now is decidedly uncomfortable.

Into the silence, Mary says, “Well. Billy’s getting donuts. You can figure out what comes next over those. Go shower.” This last part she says to Marcus. “You smell like demons.”

Tomas, his eyes still on the horizon, sips his coffee and waits for Marcus to say something witty and charming back. He doesn’t. He just leaves, and so does Mary, and Tomas drinks in the kitchen alone.

 

 

“So you can’t stay here,” Billy starts the meeting. They’re all more or less around the kitchen table, which comfortably fits three, uncomfortably fits four, and cannot fit five. Marcus, therefore, has settled in his usual position on the periphery, sitting on the counter as he devours his third strawberry donut. Tomas tries not to watch, and when he fails at that, he tries at least not to smile.

“Makes sense,” Marcus says, through his mouthful. “Small place you girls got for yourself.”       

“Big enough for three,” Trish says. “Sorry we’re not prepared to double our numbers overnight.”

“Unless you were pretty girls.” Billy winks at Marcus. “We could have worked with that. Unfortunately, you boys being what you are…”

“Underfoot, a nuisance, and male,” Marcus says.

“Perfectly put,” says Billy. “Bennett’s welcome, of course. I owe him one for Florida.”

“Plus we aren’t about to cast a stab victim out onto the street,” Mary adds.

“Sure,” says Billy who doesn’t sound like the thought is impossible. “Do you know what he’s planning?”

“Bringing down the corruption within the Vatican, I think,” Marcus says.

All three women nod sagely. “That’s the oldest mold I can think of. He’ll need his strength to scrub that,” Mary says.

“And you two?” Trish says, looking between Marcus and Tomas. “What are you two doing?”

The conversations halts as both waits for the other to answer. Tomas lowers his eyes to his uneaten, untouched glazed donut. He unseals his lips and makes his most minor confession. “I’d like to continue our work. And my training.” Tomas wishes he could look to Marcus now. He wishes he could see what emotions play across his too earnest face. “I thought that I was an exorcist. But I am—I am still in need of teaching. If Marcus will still provide it.”

“You are an exorcist,” Marcus says, and it isn’t the tone Tomas hoped for, not at all, but since Tomas will not look at his face, he cannot tell what the strange anger in Marcus’ voice means. “You exorcised Andy, you’ve exorcised others.”

“And I succumbed to pride.” Amongst other sins. “You know that.”

“Hubris is a mistake, but it’s also a mistake to walk around like you’ve got no right to hold your head up.”

“Do you not want me to come with you?” Tomas asks.

“Fucking—no, Tomas, no, that isn’t what I meant.” Marcus sighs, nothing like the sighs from last night, not that Tomas should be thinking of last night, not that there was anything to think about. He winces, and takes a bite of his donut to hide it, and the bite sits fat and bulbous on his tongue.

In the periphery of his downcast vision, Tomas sees the three women look at each other. He’s too tired to feel embarrassed.

“I’d recommend for a start,” says Mary cautiously, “getting out of Washington. We know people in California and the Southwest, people outside the Vatican who perform exorcism. You can get in touch with them. They might have information for you, or even jobs.”

“Yeah,” replies Marcus flatly.

Tomas finally manages to swallow. “They’re looking for Bennett. Will you be safe?” he asks.

“Sure,” says Mary.

“Safe enough,” says Billy.

“Safe as we ever are,” says Trish.  

“Best we can ever hope for,” Marcus mutters before he jumps down off the counter. “If they’re looking for Bennett, they’re looking for us as well. We won’t stay here and draw their eye. I’m going to talk to Bennett, see if he’s got anything to add. Otherwise—” Tomas can feel Marcus’ eyes upon him and says nothing. “Otherwise, we’ll leave this afternoon.”

 

 

They leave that afternoon, with no more direction than “south”. Tomas offers to drive. Marcus lets him. That is the extent of the conversation for the first hour. Marcus left his favorite tape in their car, the one that Marcus had bought specifically for them, and had beamed about like a proud father showing it to Tomas. Mouse’s car can’t even play tapes. This lack manages to feel like a personal failing on Tomas’ part, though perhaps that is simply casting about for easier guilt to whip himself with. They listen to the local news, which reports the story of a family man who turned himself in for multiple murders on a small island. Marcus looks out the window and cries. Tomas drives. They pray separately.

Since they don’t have a destination in mind, they have no itinerary but driving until something catches their eye. It’s nearly midnight when they finally pull over in a small hotel, better than where they normally stay. Marcus unbuckles and says to Tomas, “I can see if they’ve got separate rooms.”

Tomas, as has been his defense as of late, says nothing.

But in God’s continual joke on Tomas, the hotel is all booked up save for one room. Small mercy grants that it’s a double; Tomas will not share a bed with Marcus again. He is not that strong.

 _No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man_ , Tomas reminds himself as he sets his bag down on the bed the furthest from the door. _God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it._ What escape God offers here, Tomas cannot see. Unless God wants him to leave Marcus. And Tomas—Tomas cannot believe that to be God’s will. He cannot. Call it his ultimate weakness.  

“Tomas,” Marcus says, his voice soft and frayed. He is standing by the door to the hotel, turning over the key card in his hands. His jacket and shoes are still on, and his face is still tired. He looks as he often does, as if he is holding tears unshed in his eyes which despite everything he has seen are still so soft and gentle. “We need to talk.”

 _Forgive me, father. Bless me, father. Absolve me, father, dear God._ But Marcus is not a father, not anymore, though Tomas hopes he never grows so base as to throw that in Marcus’ face. Tomas looks away instead, looks to his bag which he opens and rifles through as if there is anything in there that he needs.

“Tomas,” Marcus says again, so gently it makes Tomas start to cry, and Marcus steps forward, alarmed, and then stops. Tomas holds up a hand, so Marcus stops.

“Please,” Tomas says, and swallows his tears. “I am fine. I am just tired.”

“Bullshit. Something happened.”

Tomas laughs without humor. “Yes. A demon.”

“That was inside you.”

Tomas says nothing.

“I’m not mad, love,” Marcus says, and even though does not know what he is offering to forgive, Tomas almost cries again at the false relief of the words. He will be mad. Or he will be disappointed, and how far they have come that Tomas would truly rather invite the demon back into his head than let Marcus down. Than have Marcus know how badly Tomas let him down already. Marcus had sent Tomas away so many times in Chicago, and Tomas had bristled each time, had raged, had fumed that he was the equal of the task God had set before him, and Marcus had been right. Marcus will realize that, and Marcus will send him home.

There is no one Tomas wants to confess his sins to except Marcus. There is no one Tomas can speak to less.

Marcus stays where he is, out of arm’s reach, as though Tomas is a skittish animal who will flee if approached. “Did you get hurt physically?” he offers cautiously, a line of questioning thrown out like a rock onto the ice to see what will hold, what will crack.

Tomas shakes his head no.

“But you got hurt?”

Tomas does not shake his head no.

“Did it show you something?”

Tomas closes his eyes.

Marcus pauses. “Demons have shown me plenty of things that have hurt. Can’t imagine how bad it would hurt if they were in my head. Sometimes they show me something I want. Sometimes they show me something I don’t want.”

Tomas holds his spare sweater in his hands as if that means anything. It gives him something to clutch. His knuckles are white, his lips locked shut. _Forgive me, Marcus, forgive me, but don’t make me say it._

“Was it one of those?” Marcus asks, in the same tone he used for Harper.

“I’m not a child,” Tomas snaps. “I am not—” _incompetent, naïve, carnal, selfish, stupid._ Tomas shuts his mouth. He cannot finish the sentence without lying.

“Don’t think you’re a child,” Marcus says. “I think you’re my partner, and you’re hurting. You’re hurting badly. I want to help you, Tomas.”

Tomas shakes his head. His mouth having opened once will not do so again. The words cannot come. _Tell me what to do, Lord,_ he prays, and the words that come back to him are of David. _Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit._

It is Tomas’ imagination, he is sure, but Marcus stands as though he wishes he were embracing Tomas. And Tomas—God forgive him—wants so badly to be embraced. “You don’t have to—” Marcus starts. Stops. Straightens and starts again. “You don’t have to keep traveling with me. Or serve as an exorcist. There’s no shame in stopping. Plenty do.”

 _When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy on me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer._ No. This is not what he wants. Not to be sent away from silence, not to be retired from unearned pity.

_I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord.” And you forgave the guilt of my sin._

"There was a demon," Tomas says, his eyes squeezed shut. It's a stupid way to start, stupid, of course there was a demon, of course Marcus knows that, but the words are there now, out in the air waiting between them. "I didn't know." Tomas' mouth is too dry to speak. The words rasp out. "I didn't know it was a demon. In the moment. Like." Tomas laughs, utterly without humor. "Like Jessica. Again."

He can't bear to look at Marcus who is looking straight at him, waiting. He can't bear to look at Marcus, but he does, and the look on his face is unreadable at a glance. Pity, maybe. Or sadness. Or disappointment. Tomas, forever so disappointing.

Tomas says to the floor, "It looked like you."

Marcus, who had pulled him away from the tortured body of Casey and screamed that he was unworthy to help this soul, says nothing. Does nothing.

Tomas licks his dry lips and hates himself for the gesture, for even the suggestion of carnality in this confession. "I thought it was you."

Marcus doesn't move, except for his thumb which scratches along the edge of the key card he clutches so hard his hand goes white. "Did it—did we—" Marcus says and stops as if he cannot imagine what word comes next.

"We were—he and I, it, we—" Tomas cannot say the words. He raises his hands and brings them together instead, and flushes at the stupidity of the gesture. "I thought it was you," he says again, quietly. Half explanation, half apology. "You came to me in the house and said the demon was gone. And—and—" _And then you asked me if I wished to kiss you, and I kissed you, and I should have known it for a dream then, because that is all I dream about_. "In the guest room, on the bed," Tomas says. It is the only detail he can shape his mouth around.

Marcus does not speak.

"I thought he was you," Tomas says. He does not know what else he can say.

Into the silence of the room, Marcus says, "Sex then." The words are as abrupt as they are cold. No, not cold. Impersonal. Professional. He sounds as if he is not in the room with Tomas. He sounds as if he is calling in to discuss the matter on speaker phone. 

"I am sorry," Tomas says. That much is true.

"Don't apologize," Marcus snaps with sudden fire, which is no better than the cold but provokes at least familiar shame. "It wasn't—God, Tomas, it wasn't your fault." And just like that, the fire is gone, and Marcus is rubbing his eyes, and turning away. He looks old. Tomas did that to him. "It's my fault."

"No, _no._ I let the demon into my head, I—I asked for this—"

"You didn't, you bloody didn't.” Marcus sounds weary beyond words. "I brought you here."

"I wanted it, I wanted it so badly. You didn't—" _You didn't know I would be weak_. _You didn’t think I would be fool enough to make the same mistake twice._  Tomas cannot manage to say it. "You didn't know what would happen."

"I know more than you," Marcus says. "And I know you."

Tomas is once again the child in Marcus' eyes. The sad, lusting idiot who cannot be trusted around demons.

"I'm sorry, Tomas," Marcus says, regret as thick as his accent, as he thinks what a mistake he made bringing Tomas.“God, forgive me. I am sorry."

Tomas, who has failed every test set before him, whispers, "There is nothing to forgive. You gave me nothing I did not ask for."

"Don't tell me that," Marcus says. Pleads. Confession is ugly work, and he is making Marcus endure it for the sake of his own conscience— _weak, stupid, carnal, selfish, Tomas, always so fucking selfish_. Marcus is never at a loss for words. But here, his mouth is open but words will not come. Marcus closes his eyes, his bright eyes, and presses a fist against his lips. “Are you alright? Are you hurt?”

“No,” says Tomas, which answers both questions. “It is—it was in my head.”

“But it feels real,” Marcus says, not to Tomas.

Tomas remembers the lie of Marcus’ fingers in his mouth, and rasps out, “Yes.”

The silence that follows has a smothering weight. It is a pause like a pillow upon the face. Tomas stands by the bed, hands clasped and head stooped. He waits for Marcus to speak; he meekly chokes on the silence.

“What do you want?” Marcus asks at last, his tone as unreadable as the floor.

_I want it to have been you._

But that is a desire Tomas doesn’t deserve anymore.

“I’d like…I’d like stay. With you,” Tomas says to his hands. Marcus takes a deep breath but otherwise says nothing. “If you’ll have me.”

“Of course,” Marcus says. “Of course. That’s not—that’s never a question.”

Tomas nods numbly. Marcus is right. There are too few exorcists now for it to have been a question. Marcus knows now more than ever how much more training Tomas needs.

Marcus is quiet, his eyes closed and head bowed as if some terrible weight pulls it down. “At the house,” Marcus says, rough words catching as they come out. “After Andy, when I came back, and you were in the guest room, and I—I touched you—”

“Please,” Tomas begs to Marcus, to the real Marcus as the demon’s horrible catechism rings in his ears. _How often have you thought about this? How often have you done something about it? You weren’t built for chastity, were you?_ And Tomas answered, panted and sweated and ejaculated his answer for Marcus, only for Marcus, but it had not been Marcus, and Marcus is not looking at him, and Tomas cannot answer such questions. He dreamed of Marcus questioning him apart until the pieces of Tomas’ heart lay open before this wondrous man, this blessed man, who already knew him as no human ever had; he dreamed of a lover’s interrogation, wrapped in each other’s arms— _and what did you really think when we first met? what is your favorite thing about me? do you know what my favorite part about you is? what have you dreamed I would do to you? what were you thinking, the first time I looked at you and thought of how your lips would feel and you caught me staring? when did you first know you loved me?_ This is not that. Tomas will never have that. He is not a man, but a collar and a calling and a weakness. “I cannot,” Tomas cries in his weakness. “Please. I am sorry, I’m sorry, I want to forget.”

Forget the demon’s touch. Forget that it wasn’t Marcus’. Tomas is not sure which he means.

“Alright, okay, okay. Okay,” Marcus says. He runs his hand through his hair and down his face and shuts his eyes and turns away. “Alright,” he whispers. “I’m. Tomas. I’m not. I’m not angry. This isn’t your fault. Please believe—please know this isn’t your fault.”

If it is not Tomas’ fault, then whose fault is it? The demon barely offered. Tomas kissed first.

“You did nothing wrong,” Marcus says, still not looking at Tomas. “I need—I am going for a walk.” He will not look at Tomas. “Get some air.” He cannot look at Tomas. “Do you—are you—I’ll find somewhere else to sleep.”

He’ll sleep in the car, that’s what Marcus means. He’s done it before, but only when both of them had to, when there was no motel open or they didn’t want to leave the possessed person’s house or the night was beautiful and gentle and they talked half the night away parked in a field under the open sky. Now Marcus proposes to curl up in the backseat of Mouse’s truck because he is too uncomfortable to sleep in a room with Tomas.

“I’ll sleep in the car,” Tomas says, and Marcus looks at him finally and says, “No, you won’t, Tomas, you won’t.”  And Tomas says, “Then neither will you. There are two beds.” And they look at each other, and Marcus looks away first.

“I’ll be back,” Marcus says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Okay,” says Tomas, watching himself pull his sleep pants out of his bag. He keeps his eyes on his hands, which unfold and splay out his pajamas on the bed, which run over the fabric until every wrinkle and crease is gone, and he keeps watching his hands as Marcus turns and flees and the door shuts and then, properly alone, confessed and absolved and abandoned, Tomas weeps.  


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for histories of sexual assault and molestation this part, in that this whole-ass fic is based around demonic destruction of consent, but this chapter is REALLY about that.

What exorcism was it? The fourth or the fifth? Back when Marcus was still counting, back when he could. Back when he was a kid with a book who loved God till his bones ached and hunger felt like benediction and all the world seemed like a promise that there were better things to come than anything Marcus had yet known. Even Father Sean had felt like a promise, when he rested his hand on Marcus' bony shoulder and told him that he had done good and that God was proud of him.

Couldn’t be later than the fifth exorcism, if Father Sean was still there. He left early on.

The demon had possessed an Irishman who sounded like his mother even when the demon didn't steal her tongue. The man even screamed like her when he wretched his own arm out of the socket trying to get out of his bonds. Father Sean didn't mind this. They were here to save the soul, not the flesh that trapped it. Put aside your doubts, Father Sean said, so Marcus put aside his doubts. He hadn't been old enough yet for there to be many of them. He had a child's certainty of the world, a rock solid faith in monsters.

And, as far as Marcus remembered, he exorcised the demon. And Father Sean told him again how proud he was. What a good boy he’d been.

Turned out the demon hadn't been exorcised after all, and there'd been some scrambling through the countryside after the lopping Irishman who'd hobbled himself and walked anyway, and someone screamed at Marcus for his weakness and set him kneeling before the Virgin for hours until someone remembered that they'd told him to do that and came to get him just as he passed out. His first failure, at least as an exorcist. But they brought the man back and Marcus finished the job, and the priests let him sleep till noon the next day. He'd never slept so long in a bed all to himself. He slept so hard that he thought he'd died and found heaven, and heaven was a perfect slumber in a sunbeam coming through a window almost as old as his country in a soft shirt and nothing else. God was proud of him again. His Light washed Marcus clean.  

Marcus likes to remember the sleeping. Doesn't remember much of anything else. Most of his early days with the church are a blur. Same as his time at the boy's home, same as his time before. And the times after, those blur too, seminary and exorcisms and vows and exorcisms and failures and exorcisms. Sometimes it feels like his brain does him a mercy, holding so little of his past where he can see it. Sometimes he wonders what the fuck was living it all worth if he can't remember how he got here. Most of the times, he doesn't think about it. He lets himself forget. Like Father Sean. Marcus forgets about that.

They sent Father Sean away sometime after the exorcism with the Irishman, but Marcus doesn't know why. He told Father Simon that something happened, but he's not sure what. He can't remember what Father Simon said. He thinks it might have been disapproving, but he can't remember whether he was disapproving of Marcus or Father Sean or of something else entirely. Marcus doesn't push any deeper into the memories. He can't even remember if they were real. Demons can look like anything they want, and Father Sean could have been the first skin they wore to touch him, but it wouldn't be the last. If it was a demon. If Father Sean did anything at all. Marcus thinks he might recall someone telling Marcus that nothing could have happened at all, but he's not sure if that was related to this exorcism or another one, or if it was even his local priest telling him not to worry about his father when he was still restricting himself to merely beating his mother.

Most of the time it doesn't matter. Sometimes it does, and remembering is like stepping on a nail. Or falling.

Marcus is falling.

He hits the pavement, catches himself with his hands mostly but still smashes his chin against the sidewalk. It doesn't hurt, not yet. Never hurts right away. "Shit!" he spits and tastes blood in his mouth. Marcus' ankle, the shit one, the one that a sixteen year-old once snapped with his bare hands when Marcus got too close, it takes the chance to cock up on him now. Tripped on a curb or something. Doesn't matter. Doesn't fucking matter. It's pitch black and he doesn't know where he is. Doesn't remember how he got here. One second ago he was thirteen in a basement with a demon or a priest or both, and now he's an old man sprawled on the sidewalk in the dead of night.

It's nighttime. No one is out. No one asks him if he is okay.

There was the time in Barcelona. Can't even guess which exorcism that was. The hundredth, the thousandth, the first. All the same eventually. Marcus had a collar around his neck at that point, and the woman on the bed laughed at it as she pulled her clothes off. "Come on, Father," she'd rasped. "How is chastity a virtue if you don't know what you're missing?"

And the time in Berlin, when on the fourth day of the exorcism, the beloved grandfather chained up suddenly looked like the man at the darkened bar across the city who had bought Marcus a drink and smiled as he talked. And the man at the bar said to Marcus, "Chains are a bit much for your first time, aren't they?" And Marcus had gotten as far as undoing his legs when sense returned to him.

And the time in Lima, when the demon shredded the ropes that held its host and skipped seduction all together in favor of sadism, and had laughed in Marcus' ear as its nails rent his shirt.

It’s the job, that’s all. It’s the calling. It’s the devil. It’s everywhere. St. Agnes, martyred child, protect us as the angels protected you from those who thought their earthly hands could defile you. St. Maria Goretti, martyred child, pray for us as you prayed for your murderer. And rejoice together in heaven, you murdered children, you precious brave beloved children, who didn’t deserve the lives they got, who were asked for so much, who were Marcus’ age when he was in the basement with Father Sean or the demon or nothing at all. If he’d have died that day, perhaps he would have been mourned. You get the feeling sometimes that the Catholic Church frowns on survival. But the girls should have lived, Agnes, Maria, all the saints of chastity and virtue thus named for how they suffered with open hearts; they should have grown old and happy and uneventful.

Tomas will martyr himself for God. Tomas wears his future sainthood like a shroud, and once Marcus thought that all he could do was carry his cross. Marcus knows better now. He does so much more than that. He is the soldier whipping Tomas along.

When the church took him in, they gave him a Bible and a dictionary of saints, and at night he could read one or the other. He read of saints, looked for the ones who died in bed, lingered on the ones who were flayed alive, or beaten by the mob, or stretched on the rack. Even Jesus cried out to his Father in his last mortal moments, and even Jesus had died in agony. Jesus hung over them as they prayed, a life-sized wooden crucifixion. His sculptor had carved him crying, had articulated wooden tears and wooden blood rolling down his wooden face as he cast his eyes to the heaven, imploring mercy or death or merciful death. Marcus would count his ribs during Mass, would trace the straining tendons of his tortured body. Father Sean approved. There is a holy morbidity that a lifetime in black encourages. Look upon our savior. He was human as you are human. Remember how he suffered.

It is a holy duty to imagine suffering. So Marcus picks himself up off the sidewalk and imagines.

But it's too easy to imagine Tomas in bed. Too easy to imagine him crying out Marcus' name. Marcus has too often imagined Tomas underneath him, and enjoyed the fantasies in their impossibility, in their distance from his real life where Tomas calls him hermano and repents his love of a distant woman. His imaginings have been sins, but not ones demons could use against him for there was no shame in them. Marcus has never been ashamed of loving Tomas. Who could know Tomas and not love him?

When Marcus imagined Tomas underneath him, crying out Marcus' name, though, he had not been crying out for mercy. He had not been begging for relief, pleading to Marcus' better nature. He had not feared Marcus' touch. He had not wanted Marcus to stop.

I thought the demon was you, Tomas had said, so quietly it was barely audible, and in the silence of the last days, in how he would not look at Marcus, who he fled the bed and Marcus’ touch, Marcus heard everything Tomas had not said.

Tomas had thought the demon was Marcus, and he had thought that Marcus had raped him.

Marcus' bleeding palm slams into the sidewalk, and since it doesn't hurt enough the first time, he does it again and again, until the flesh rips open and he thinks, _I can't break bones, I can't, because Tomas will worry and he will try to take care of me and he will reach out for my hand, or he will not, and either one would kill me._ Marcus knows this without hesitation.

On the guest bed, Marcus had embraced Tomas on Andy’s guest bed, on the setting of Tomas' nightmare which wore Marcus' face and Marcus' skin, and to this day Marcus does not know if it was the demon or Father Sean that molested him. The face is the same. The mind remembers the face. Forgive me, Father, if Marcus remembers wrong. Fuck you, Father, if he does not. Marcus prayed to St. Agnes, and Father Sean was transferred, and Marcus can still not remember the truth. And Marcus is a violent man, a murderer twice over and now a demon in Tomas' gentle eyes—how much Marcus has inherited from his earthly fathers. Or maybe the rot was always there.

Tomas wants to forget. Marcus wants to interrogate, wants to know, needs to know, did the demon do what Marcus has dreamed of doing? _Did it worship your body with unholy kisses, did it profane you with filthy hands, did it force itself into you or did it ride you? Did it tell you I'd dreamed of this? Did it tell you I imagined you on my tongue like communion, with me on my knees as you cupped my head and stroked my cheek with your thumb? Did it tell you how I abused myself in the shower to the thought of you joining me, how we’d keep each other warm in the lukewarm water, how I'd anoint you with hotel soap?_

_Did you cry, did you hurt, did you curse me, did you forgive me? When did you know it was not me? Do you know it was not me? Can you know it was not me?_

It should have been Marcus. He's suffered so many scars, what's one more. What's one more trauma, half remembered. What's one more offense against this unworthy flesh.

Tomas knelt before Casey and pressed his mouth to her while her rotting mouth gaped in horrible, soundless mirth. And Marcus had cast him away, had cast him away again and again for his weakness, for his lapse, and had never sat Tomas down to say, this will always happen. They will always work this weakness against you. You are a man of flesh and they will torture you with it. It has happened to me. This is how you protect yourself.

Marcus had said nothing and taken Tomas from his family, his parish, his home, and brought him to the field, and let him loose as a lamb among the wolves because he did not wish to distress the lamb with descriptions of teeth.

Bennett had warned him, Bennett who left the field and knew what drove a man to do so. Marcus had not listened. Mouse had warned him, in her absence, in his memory, her writhing and moaning as a demon puppeted her hands to lift her skirts for him. Marcus had abandoned her. Now Tomas would not look at him, did not want Marcus to approach him, and still wished for Marcus to share a room with him. Who offered to sleep in the car for Marcus' fucking comfort. Who confessed to Marcus as if he had done something wrong.

All Marcus wants to do is sweep up Tomas in his arms, force his bowed head up—force, no, God, no _. Do you believe you did nothing wrong?_ Marcus wants to demand that of Tomas, Marcus, who has no right to demand anything of him. Marcus is a violent man. He wants to shove compassion down Tomas' throat. He wants to pin Tomas to the bed and make him hear that he's worthy, that he's perfect, that he's done nothing wrong and God loves him and Marcus is sorry, Marcus is so sorry, and that none of Marcus' regret is Tomas' to bear.

 _I want to forget,_ Tomas had said. And, _I want to stay with you._ The trust of the latter, Marcus is wholly unworthy of. And the former. There’s plenty of things Marcus has wanted to forget. And mostly he has, except when he doesn’t, and he’s crying on the floor or a boat or a church or a sidewalk or at the slightest hint of kindness. But Tomas is not Marcus, who feels so thoroughly tenderized that it is no wonder God has found less boxed ears to speak into. Tomas is young and strong and brave and better than Marcus ever was. Tomas knows that too. That will help. Pride’s evil, sure, but not as evil as the lack of it. Lack will shrink you until you believe you deserve every nail in your flesh.

If Tomas wants to talk, Marcus will talk. If Tomas wants him to leave, Marcus will leave. If Tomas wants silence, Marcus will stitch his mouth shut.

 

 

It’s late by the time Marcus finds the hotel again. He has no memory of walking away from it and no memory of what chain it was or how long he’d walked. His ankle kills him and his palms pulse with his heartbeat. There’s blood in his beard. Blood and pebbles. His chin’s busted up but nothing feels broken. Lucky, all things considered. Marcus has broken his jaw before, a swift kick from a brother of a possessed person who didn’t appreciate his sister being tied to the bed. Doctor wired his jaw shut. Marcus had had to exorcise that demon mostly by grunting.

Funny anecdote, by exorcism standards. Marcus had thought he might tell it to Tomas sometime.

He passes their hotel twice before he remembers that Mouse has got their truck and they have hers. Hers is parked right out front. Marcus stole new plates for it when they stopped that afternoon at a rest area. Safe enough probably, but couldn’t hurt to swap them again soon. Leapfrog through identities down the coast.

It’s a decent truck. Marcus has slept in worse backseats. Marcus hadn’t agreed that he wouldn’t sleep in the car, but Tomas had told him not to, but Tomas needs a good night’s rest. It’s two or three in the morning, and they need to be on the road to nowhere in the morning. It doesn’t warrant waking him as he comes back in. Especially if Marcus’ presence means he couldn’t sleep. Tomas hadn’t slept at the trio’s house. Marcus could tell by his face in the morning. Marcus know altogether too much about how to read Tomas’ body.  

But Tomas told him not to. In the absence of any other guidance ( _God, please, I need you, I need you, I’m sorry for all I’ve done to be so unworthy, I beg your forgiveness, I beg your wisdom, I beg anything from You that You will let me have that I might do well by the man I love)_ , Marcus has to trust Tomas’ word. So he pulls the keycard out of his pocket with bloody fingers and opens the door as quietly as he can. The dark bundle that is Tomas on his bed does not shift as Marcus slides across the bedroom, into the bathroom which he knows will turn the fan on if he turns the light on. He fumbles with exceeding slowness for a towel, and when he has it, he holds it against the spigot to swallow the sound of water. In the pitch black of the room, he washes his wounds, his face, his palms, his right knee where he now has a hole in this pants. He takes off his shoes and probes his ankle, but it doesn’t feel broken or sprained, just tender. Anyway, they don’t have time for it to be injured so Marcus decides it’s not. He should have gotten ice for it, but it’d just clink Tomas awake. Too late now.

The Irishman with a demon lassoed to his soul broke both his ankles escaping his bonds and walked ten miles before the priests found him again. Marcus, who has lassoed his soul to Tomas, can do no less than that.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ........I'm not updating the chapter count yet because it isn't set in stone, it depends on how the draft turns out, but there might be two more chapters instead of one more chapter. It depends on the length. It's not certain. I just want to make you aware of the possibility. Either way, it's definitely end game. This was supposed to be a one-shot of ten thousand words max. Why do I even write outlines. 
> 
> Thank you all so much for your comments, they validate my id wonderfully and have really helped me keep writing as life gets crazy busy.

In the morning, Marcus has a bloody chin and bandaged palms, and when Tomas asks what happens, Marcus smiles wryly and says, "Tripped like a dickhead."

It's such a normal moment that Tomas nearly doesn't understand the words. Marcus goes back to his map, tracing the highways with one thumb while the other worries at his lower lip. "Bennett's got friends in Sacramento," Marcus says. "We could head there. Or try to get word to Mouse. But Bennett thought she might want to keep working with him. He likes her. Sort of. He thinks she's a wildcard, and he's probably not wrong."

Marcus sits at the little table that serves as forlorn altar for their hotel provided coffeemaker, which is brewing a pot Tomas knows by now will be somehow both flavorless and acrid. There's two chairs. The one Marcus is not sitting in is partially kicked out, inviting.

Tomas hesitates, and sits. "You think we should go to Sacramento?" Tomas asks. The table is small. If they both take special, new pains that their knees don't touch, neither mentions it or meets the other's eyes. They can't. They have to look at this map.

"I think we could go to Sacramento. I'm not sure it's got anything to recommend it besides some Benedictines that owe Bennett a favor. He said they weren't in our line of work. I doubt they'd have any leads."

Tomas clasps his hands between his knees to keep them from shaking and asks in a normal tone of voice, "Leads?"

"For cases," says Marcus, still not looking up. "Exorcisms. If you're--" And he falters, just a moment, his eyes darting up and darting away, and his hands are poorly wrapped in the fraying gauze Marcus keeps in his knapsack, and his face is tired, and he woke before Tomas to shower, shave, cover himself, and now he is here at this small table, studying a gas station map, like this is any morning. Like the night before closed the matter of the night before. Truth came over Marcus like a twitch and now it is gone. He sounds almost normal, almost casual, when he says, "If you're still interested in the work."

"I am," Tomas says instantly, and Marcus' honest face does a poor job of concealing the relief that passes over it. Relief and something else, but it is gone too quickly. He likes to think it was joy. That is a pleasant, if likely untrue thought.

Repentance requires honesty, if only to himself, and so Tomas forces himself to think what he thinks: _I wish I could kiss him right now._ Having thought it, he hopes the thought will go.

"It'll be harder," Marcus says. "Without Bennett giving us cases."

"We found the last one without him," Tomas says.

"Yeah, and that went so well," Marcus says dryly.

And it's all so normal. It's so normal that Tomas practically chokes on it.

He doesn't choke. He reaches for the plastic-covered Styrofoam cups and asks, "If not Sacramento, where?"

Marcus’ thumb caresses Utah. "How do you feel about the desert?"

As they finishing packing the car, Tomas cannot stand it anymore. He counts to three, then then ten, then twenty, then fifty, and finally, after promising himself he’ll talk on the count of one hundred, his mouth opens without his permission. “Are you pretending last night did not happen?”

The keys jangle in Marcus’ hands in response. He starts the engine, puts the car in drive. "You said you want to forget," Marcus says as he pulls out of the spot. He says it as if he's remarking on the length of their drive. No, that's not right. He says it as if he would like to sound as if he's remarking on the length of their drive. Tomas buckles in and says nothing. "If you want to talk, we'll talk."

Tomas remembers the conversation last night and says, "I don't want to talk. If that's alright."

"It's great. It's what you want." Marcus's hands falter on the steering wheel just once, as if he grasps it to remind himself where he is. And then the moment is over. And they are driving.

They don't talk. The silence is uncomfortable, fraught. And it goes on. Tomas props his heads up against the window and reminds himself that he is going to be better now. Marcus drives and hums tunelessly. He doesn't turn the radio on. Tomas counts the livestock on the side of the road.

 _I can work with this_ , he thinks. _I don't wish to, but I could._

Tomas had prayed last night. Prayed with a fervor that he associates with the final days of exorcisms, when everyone is so close to breaking and it is God's will who shatters first. Help me, help me, help me, Tomas had beseeched God. He knelt and prayed and wept and cursed himself for his weakness, for his grievous fault, and all the while Marcus was gone and hurting, bleeding somewhere out in the dark. Fix me, Tomas prayed, but take nothing from me.

Tomas has never seen God, not like Marcus has seen God. Tomas cannot feel the absence of God as keenly as Marcus does. Tomas does not feel anything as keenly as Marcus does. Marcus is a chest cracked open to show the bleeding heart; he is wounded, never scarred and never healed. Tomas wants to cup that loving heart in his hands like a dove. Tomas wants to curl in Marcus' open chest and take the blows that Marcus believes he must endure.

He will not stop loving Marcus. Loving Marcus cannot be wrong, for Jesus was a man who loved His friends and loved those around him as He was loved. But Tomas will love as Christ loved.

He'd studied once with a nun, a Mother of considerable faith and intellect who smiled beneficently on the stammering seminarian who volunteered at her food bank and hid love letters in his Bible. One day when they were cleaning up after the rush, he showed them to her.

"Remember your vows, she said. “Remember why you wish to take them."

Because I don't know what else to do, had been the answer perched terrifyingly on the tongue. He kept it trapped behind his teeth. Doubt, he had thought then, could be smothered if never aired. But the Mother saw how his unsettled spirit failed to settle, and sighed, and looked far younger as she said, "It is our duty to love the world, as Christ loved the world. That is what it means to join the Church. Human love is always exclusionary. Marriage is a sacrament that says this person and only this person will be the one whom you romantically love. We love our children more than other children. We cherish our friends more than our acquaintances and enemies. You want to be a priest?"

Because she phrased this like a question, because the answer was more yes than no, Tomas nodded.

"Then you want to stand in Christ's place." The Mother tapped Tomas' bible, bookmarked with letters of intimate friendship. "Would you council her different than you would council her boyfriend?"

Tomas had thought about fist fighting her boyfriend. In the spirit of honesty, he muttered that. To his surprise, the Mother laughed. "That urge won't go away once you join the Church, trust me. You’ll be amazed how much punching you think about. You do get better at silencing it."

"But what do I do?" Tomas asked, and hated the whine of desperation in his voice. "Do I love no one? Grow close to no one?"

"You love everyone," the Mother said. "And you grow close to God." And that was the end of the conversation. Two novitiates across the room were struggling to a table, and the Mother crossed the room to instruct them with the otherworldly grace that nuns often possessed and unfortunately manifested as appearing as if they had wheels underneath their habits. Tomas kissed his Bible and worried if the kiss applied as well to the other words hidden in it.

Later that night, far later, in the middle of walking him through the budget and logistics of holding weekly a food bank that fed two hundred, in the privacy of her office, she said, "I had a special friend once." Tomas, who was still squinting at the spreadsheet of wholesale food prices, took a moment to register the conversation shift. But the wistfulness in her voice was a new tone. He'd never heard something so soft from her before. "Sister Josepha. You've met her, I believe."

"Yes," said Tomas, for Sister Josepha was no distant figure lost at sea as the tone in the Mother's voice suggested but another nun of the convent.

"We spent every day together." The Mother chuckled. "We still spend every day together. It is a small world. But we sought each other out for the delight we gave each other." The Mother did not laugh again. She sat ramrod straight and looked through her reading glasses over Tomas' shoulder at some distant memory. "We were too attached. We excluded others from our lives. We preferred each other above all else. We knew we were wrong. We stopped. We still speak, of course. As I said, it is a small world. But we both take special pains not to linger in our conversations. I find it helpful to consult a watch and finish our talks after five minutes. If I did not, I could talk to her for hours."

Tomas said hesitantly, gently, "That sounds very sad."

"It is, my boy. But I still love her, as Christ would."

"Did Jesus not have his apostles? Could they not be counted as his special friends?" Tomas asked.

"Oh yes," said the Mother. "When I think that, I like to imagine that Judas was his favorite."

 

***

 

Marcus met Dolores a decade ago, an exorcism in Guatemala that took two months longer than anyone expected. Her son survived, had a son himself now that Dolores said he took to church with the obsessive terror that people who survived exorcisms sometimes get. The Church praises that renewed spiritual vigor. Marcus always thought it was a little sad the way they worshipped to appease God like He ran a protection racket. Seemed more like trauma that spiritual renewal to Marcus, but what did he know? The two had always been aligned in him.

Dolores lives in St. George these days, with her daughter Maria who never believed what her mother and her brother underwent back home. Tomas talks with her in the kitchen, as they make dinner. Marcus’ Spanish is rusty, and never the sharpest to begin with, but it’s nice just to listen to the two of them, talking faster than Marcus’ tired ears can keep up with. How fluid Tomas is in his mother tongue. He’s different, speaking it, a different cadence, a different tone, a different warmth with the lightness of a man who needs to think of only what to say, not how to say it. He’s some freer stranger.

“Sure, I know some things, Father,” Dolores says. They sit in her living room, photo albums spread out on the table. Dolores insisted on showing him the family before they talked business, so Marcus watched her flip through the years, and the Galeano clan swells with marriages and births. Dolores sits at the head of a small dynasty now, and she loves each member with a specificity that must strain her heart. She leans back on the couch now, her Coca Cola resting on her stomach. “Why are you asking, _me?_ Usually I am asking you.”

“Because I’m not a Father anymore,” Marcus says. He points to his bare neck. “Remember?”

“You are always Father Marcus,” Dolores says. “If all my children died, I would still be a mother.”

“It’s not the same.”

“No, I forgot, you are very special.” Dolores casts her eyes to the kitchen, where conversation bubbles forth. “But less special that before? You have someone else with you who is also very special.”

“Yeah,” Marcus says quietly. “He’s special.”

“You say sadly.” Dolores drank her Coke. “You’re too sad, Father Marcus, always so sad. Maybe you don’t need another demon to hunt.”

Marcus spreads his hands. “It’s what I do, darling. Who I am.”

“You’re a man, Father Marcus. You do what men do.” She grimaces. “Unfortunately.”

He laughs, which she tuts at with a smile. The sound of Tomas from the kitchen falters a moment. Marcus’ got the paranoid feeling it’s because of him.

“I have a demon, yes,” Dolores says, watching him too sharply from her position half melted into the couch cushion. “I am wondering if it will do you good.”

 _Give me something to defeat. Give me something to kill._ “Demons never do.”

“No,” she says. “Sometimes they show you the rot you must rip out.”

Marcus tries not to think of anything as he says, “I know the rot. It’s all rot.”

In the kitchen, Maria says something and Tomas laughs. Marcus hasn’t heard him laugh since—

Marcus buries the thought under the rot. “Come on, darling. What good’s an exorcist without an exorcism?”

“Hmmm.” Dolores squints at him with her one good eye. He smiles. She rejects it. “No good hunting demons on an unsettled heart. Or an empty stomach. We can fix one of those tonight.”

Dinner is delicious, or so Marcus says. He barely tastes it. He resents eating it. Dolores told him about a man in the area that she has been working with, Oscar Villanueva, a recent immigrant, an indifferent churchgoer, a quiet man. She doesn’t know anything about him, except that he once lived with four other men and now he lives alone, and the four men came to Dolores and begged her help. There is something evil in that house, they said, and it lives in Oscar.

Eating is a waste of time. There’s a _job_.

But Tomas is finally putting food in his mouth, a lot of it, as if he’d just remembered hunger. To Dolores’ delight, he eats everything she puts on his plate, and when she piles more on, he eats that too.

“You’ve been starving him!” Dolores chides Marcus.

Marcus smiles tightly and goes back to shuffling his rice.

Conversation slows around him in rapid, melodic Spanish. He picks up bits of it, could pick up more if he tried, but his head’s pounding. His jaw still aches where he smashed it against the ground, and the fall seems to have rattled up to the skull. His ankle’s killing him too. Might be sprained after all. Marcus wrapped it up last night, hasn’t looked at it since, has tried his best to ignore it twinging all day. The key is not to limp. Tomas might feel obliged to offer himself up as a crutch then.

“I’ll take the couch,” Marcus says after dinner. Dolores and Maria have set them to the dishes, so Tomas washes while Marcus dries, and because it is a small kitchen, even without touching, Marcus can feel the heat of Tomas’ body. Tomas, therefore, must feel the heat of his. Marcus tries to give him what space he can, tries not to box him in or block the exit. Tomas still looks carved from stone, a man tensed until he petrifies.

Marcus thinks Tomas will argue. Tomas simply says, “Fine,” and hands Marcus another plate.

 

***

 

“We’ve got extra sheets in the hall closet,” Maria says as she plumps the pillows for him.

Tomas holds his backpack in front of him like a shield and says, “This is fine, thank you. Perhaps Marcus might need them.”

“I’ll ask him.” She straightens, cracks her back, nods back in the direction of the living room. “So, you and him,” Maria says coyly. “You two scream at people together until they promise the demon is gone?”

Maria doesn’t believe in exorcisms, but she believes Tomas is a nice boy, a good-looking boy, with a mouth worth glancing at. She makes her attention clear, in the way some people do in the face of professed chastity. They either do not believe it or believe they would enjoy being the one to make a man of God break it. Maria is right—Tomas is not chaste. Maria is wrong—Tomas will never break his vow again.

Tomas says wearily, “That is one way to put it.”

“You tell yourself another story, huh?”

Maria is nice, gracious enough hosting them for dinner, indulgent of her mother’s old friendship with Marcus, willing to clear the guest room with no notice, but she believes exorcism as much as she believes his chastity. Marcus told him once that God puts skeptics on Earth for loads of reasons, but not least of which for taking the piss out of self-important exorcists who start thinking too highly of himself. Tomas can assure God that it works.

“You don’t believe we can help your friend,” Tomas says.

“Oscar isn’t my friend,” Maria says. “And I don’t know. Maybe you can. Mateo was in a dark place and Marcus helped him out. If he wants to call Mateo working out his inner demons an exorcism, I guess that’s an exorcism.”

Tomas rests his bag on the floor and shrugs out of his jacket. “There was a demon in him and Marcus drove it out. That is not a metaphor for anything.”

Maria is nice, gracious, but she gives him a look that says that she is less indulgent of her mother’s eccentricities than Tomas originally thought. “Be as literal as you like. Just don’t fuck anyone up worse than they are.” She pauses on her way out of the room. “You and your friend look like shit,” Maria says over her shoulder. “You don’t look like you should be trying to help anyone right now except yourselves.”

When she is gone, and the house is quiet, Tomas kneels on the floor, relishes the ache of his knees on the hardwood, and prays.

He has been here before.

In Tomas’ teenage years, his abuela dragged him by the shoulder to confession every week, would not let him leave until it was done, and so Tomas every week, burning with shame, confessed the same thing: lustful thoughts, lustful actions. And the priest would ask, as if Tomas were an ear of corn to be methodically shucked bare and boiled, who did Tomas lust after, and how often, and what thoughts did he have. He had a dream in the night of his teacher? And what did he do with her? And did he think of kissing her? Where? On her mouth? Her neck? Her breasts? Her genitalia? And Tomas, who had not considered previously that his mouth could go such places, would stammer his adolescent lusts until the priest was satisfied that God was satisfied. And Tomas would go home, unable to lift his eyes from the ground for fear of seeing something that would stir that improper passion within him.

The worst was masturbation, which Tomas never did, and which Father Antonio never believed. It didn’t matter. His body betrayed him anyway. No one told him wet dreams were natural, least of all his abuela who stripped his sheets like something had died in the bed. Tomas did his best to hide it from her, but he was an honest child, or one convinced that every lie or omission damned him to eternal suffering, and she watched him closely.

“Filthy,” she’d say. “Pray for virtue, Tomas. You’re a good boy, but the devil has his hands in you. Pray.”

So Tomas prayed and went to confession and enumerated his lusts and failures, his thoughts of self-abuse and his body’s betrayals, and when Father Antonio deemed the confession complete, he was assigned his penance to make right with God for his filthy ways. At least until next week.

“I have thought of kissing my friend,” he confessed one week, shaking so hard the box seemed to shake with him, and Father Antonio asked, “What manner of kissing?” and Tomas said, “On the mouth,” and Father Antonio asked, “With your tongue?” and Tomas said, “Yes,” and Father Antonio asked, “And where else have you thought about kissing your friend?” and Tomas said, “Just his mouth,” and Father Antonio asked, “His?”

When Tomas was silent in response, that lusting tongue swollen and still, Father Antonio said, “Oh my son, you are more wicked than I ever feared.”

And then Father Antonio enumerated the things one man might lust about another man, the acts of filth that they might commit together, and Tomas said, no, no, he hadn’t thought any of those things, they hadn’t occurred to him, and Father Antonio said that when two men lie together they wallow in feces and hellfire, and Tomas said that he had never lain with anyone.

Father Antonio never learned the specifics of Tomas’ fantasies, for there was so little sinful about them. Benny was an older boy, just by a year, and taller, with thick eyelashes like a girl and the beginning of facial hair sprouting on his chin. He played goalie on their football team, and everyone knew he wasn’t very good, but it was okay because neither was anyone else. One time they won a game through luck and most likely divine intervention, and Benny slung his arm around Tomas’ shoulders and kissed his forehead while Tomas laughed, his hand against Benny’s chest.  

It was not until later when he was sixteen, and Father Antonio left to a grander parish and Father Jorge arrived to hear Tomas’ dire confession, that it was gently suggested to Tomas that this was perhaps too much detail and too much guilt. “You need not hate your soul for having a body,” Father Jorge said, the first time anyone had suggested such a thing to him. “Your teenage years will not be the ones that find the limits of God’s unconditional love.”

Father Jorge agreed that masturbation was a sin, of course. But a sin to prevent a greater sin may be acceptable in the eyes of God. Tomas spent his time lusting or fearing lust or rejoicing he wasn’t lusting or regretting that he had lusted. “It may be better, for your spiritual well-being,” Father Jorge suggested gently, “to simply have it out and be done with it.”

And it had worked. With the implicit approval of a man of God, Tomas abused himself until he was spent and woke up the next day as though a boot had been taken from his throat. Medicinal masturbation, he called it in his head, half-joking, half-not. _My body is weak, so I nourish my body_ _that someday my body might not poison my soul._

It had worked, to a point. The technique was fraying before Marcus ever entered his life. The mind he’d kept so assiduously blank while he pleasured himself filled with images of Jessica. Her handwriting made him hard. Her metaphors made him grasp himself. God, how lonely he had been and how sweet her words. How lonely they’d both been. Tomas hopes she is not lonely now. It is still her face he sees sometimes, in the quiet of the night when he wishes he had someone to hold. But she is slipping from him. She is becoming not a body but words once more. She will live her life without him, and inside of him she flattens to a sheet of onion paper.

But if there had been no demon, no Rances, no Marcus, he would never have touched her. If he had not broken his will with a demon, he would not have broken his vows with her. He knows that. His relationship with Jessica had been manageable, once. They might have comfortably pined for decades.

As of late, Tomas’ fantasies have looked different.

Marcus rolls his pencil between his fingers and Tomas’ mouth goes dry. Marcus stretches his hands above his head and his shirt rides up, and the world narrows to that strip of skin and the pants slung low on the hips not because of fashion but because they don’t quite fit. Tomas pictures the soft spots of Marcus’ body where age has softened him. Marcus likes toast and runny eggs, and when he mops up his plate with the last scrap of bread, Tomas wants to kiss the breakfast out of his mouth. Tomas thinks on that mouth a lot, and does not palm himself through his pants while he does so. Marcus comforts a child, and Tomas is overcome by the impossibility of their procreation, and how, God, how he wishes nonetheless to try, and rejoice in the fruitless joy of trying.

Marcus has no vows anymore. Tomas does. Marcus need not be bound to a failed priest, less dove than albatross. Tomas has abused himself and Marcus by extension every time he pretends his hand is Marcus’. A lesser sin to prevent a greater one, that was what it was once. Tomas is older than that now. His body is stronger.

Tomas prays for strength, nonetheless. Strength, and a dreamless sleep.

 

***

 

This is what normal looks like:

Buying chains and protein bars in bulk. Soundproofing the house. Assessing the neighbors. Comforting the family. Breathing deep. Grasping towards God.

Prayer.

All this they still do, once it is clear that a demon has been festering too long in Oscar Villanueva’s body. They buy the chains and protein bars. They nails boards and pillows to the windows. They tell the neighbors they’re going to be doing some repairs, and the neighbors have lived long enough with the rot of the demon that they just nod and look away. Oscar has no family; they assure Dolores in their stead. They gather themselves. They grasps. Marcus grasps in vain.

They pray.

Marcus used to love this part, when they stood together so close that Marcus could imagine that the hand he clasped was Tomas’. Their heads bowed until their foreheads nearly bumped, and sometimes they did, and sometimes they stayed like that, and Marcus could not feel the warmth of God but he could feel the sweat on Tomas’ brow mingling with the sweat on his own, and that felt holy as anything.

Today they pray separately. Marcus feels neither God nor Tomas. He feels nothing at all.

"I'll take lead on this," Marcus says.

Tomas, who cannot seem to fasten his collar, freezes. "What do you mean?"

Marcus tugs his sleeves down. He does not offer to help Tomas dress. "I don't want you engaging directly.”

"Then what?" Tomas lowers his hands from his neck. "I stand in the corner and read my Bible while you work?"

"You stand back and read your Bible, yeah," Marcus snaps and instantly regrets it. "That's exorcism, Tomas. It works."

"You don't trust me," Tomas says.

"I don't want you hurt," Marcus says.

"You think I'll be hurt because you don't trust me. As an exorcist."

Marcus closes his eyes. "Tomas—"

"I am not mad," Tomas says, too neutrally, going back to his collar. "I understand."

Marcus has never felt smaller or crueler than in the face of Tomas’ acceptance. "It's not punishment,” he says weakly. “I don’t—I trust you. You’re my—you’re an exorcist. I just think—I’m worried—you might be—fuck, I don't know. Vulnerable. Right now."

"I said I understand,” Tomas says. He cannot get his collar to fasten. He rips it off and shoves it in his pocket and does not look at Marcus. “Let’s just get this done.”  

 

 

 

Three days in, the exorcism isn't going well.

The victim is named Oscar, and he is in his thirties, and he is from Honduras, and he works at a convenience store, and he enjoys loud music his neighbors hate, and that is the total sum of what Dolores can tell Marcus about him. His apartment yields no further clues. His housemates fled before an interview. Oscar seems to have no personal possessions. Not a photo, not a well-thumbed book, not a strange knickknack that doesn't belong. He barely exists in this apartment, except as a body on a bed.

"Come on, Father," the demon hisses through Oscar's mouth. "Let me have this one. No one else wanted him.”

Marcus lists saints. Tomas beseeches their prayers. The demon smirks. He seems to have scarcely noticed the crucifix in his face. He hardly flinched at the holy water.

I am the hands of God and I have gone limp, Marcus thinks, and his words stutter, and the demon laughs with Marcus' father's fucking laugh.

"Marcus!" Tomas shouts as he yanks Marcus back by the neck of his sweater. The force chokes off Marcus' snarl. He doesn't even remember lunging forward. It came over him like lightning--hatred, pure hatred, so white hot it froze. Kill the fucking thing, Marcus thinks. Mouse doesn't have a bad idea. Who has time for artisanal exorcisms in the twenty-first century? Assembly line exorcisms, that's the future. Fast food faith. Line them up, knock them down.

"Got a temper, don't you, Marky boy?" the demon drawls. "A chip off the old block, ain't you. Who knows what you'll work yourself up to?"

"Fuck you," Marcus spits, which isn't a prayer and isn't a rite and isn't an exorcism and isn't what you say to demons who just want you mad, angry, hurting. Let them see you sweat, let them see you bleed; don't let them see you care. "You ugly hateful thing."

"Marcus," Tomas says, sharp as a whip snap. "Marcus, come on." And Tomas reaches for his arm to pull him out of the room. But Tomas hesitates before he can touch him. And Marcus' insides are oil, thick and black and bubbling, and he jerks away from Tomas' not-touch to squat like a gargoyle by the bed.

"You're nothing," Marcus tells the demon. "You're corruption. You're filth."

"We are what we are." The demon smiles a black, broken smile. "We never corrupt anyone who isn't craving corruption. Is that right, Tomas?"

Marcus punches it. Punches the demon. Punches Oscar, whose head snaps back with a crunch as Marcus slams his fist into the side of his nose. He starts bleeding instantly, was already bleeding from the possession and is now bleeding from Marcus' fist, and Marcus' fist has blood on it, and it is Oscar's blood. Oscar, who they are here to save. And the demon makes a noise, a groan, the kind that could be either pleasure or pain, and it laughs and laughs while the blood spills from Oscar's mouth.

“You two are so cute,” it says. “Did you really think he’d ever want you?”

Tomas touches him this time.

Tomas is strong, thank God. Strong enough to haul Marcus to his feet and out of the room, to the sound of the demon's gurgling mirth. Tomas grabs Marcus so hard from the forearm that he knows they'll be a bruise. Good, good, he thinks, bruises are good. The flesh is weak and the spirit is willing. Mortify the flesh until the spirit can't.

"What is wrong with you," Tomas asks, but he bites the words off before he can get to the question mark. It's just a thing you say. Tomas said it without thinking. They both know.

“You’re unfit right now,” Tomas says. His hands are still wrapped around Marcus’ arms. “You’re not thinking.”

“I’m fine,” Marcus says, except he’s not, he’s clearly not, because all he can think about is Tomas’ grip on him, and how much he has missed Tomas’ hands. Did he do this? On purpose? Did he fuck up so Tomas would touch him?

Marcus tenses, and Tomas lets him go. As if Marcus were some burning thing.

“I’m fine,” Marcus says again, but just barely, the words only just managing to slip from his lips.

“No,” says Tomas. “You’re not.”

They stay in the hallway like that. Not touching, not separating. Muffled through the door, the demon laughs and laughs and laughs.

 

***

 

Dolores comes over with food, takes one look at them, and banishes them from the house until tomorrow morning. “You do no one good like this,” she says. Neither Tomas nor Marcus has the strength to argue. They sit on the front stoop in the early evening chill and pick at Maria’s cooking. Tomas hasn’t eaten anything that wasn't a bar in two days, but he can’t eat. Marcus doesn’t either. He looks old. Tomas has never thought that before, looking at Marcus. Marcus has been an exorcist since before Tomas was born, but he never wore it as hard as he does now. He looks like if he closed his eyes, he’d pass in his sleep.

“She’ll be cross with you if you don’t clear your plate,” Tomas says. He tries to sound casual. Marcus tries to smile.

“I’ll leave it for the morning. Breakfast pupusa.”

Tomas nibbles his. He doesn’t taste it. The texture feels like paste. “Good idea,” Tomas says, putting it aside. His fingers feel greasy. He wishes he had a napkin. His clothes are filthy enough without streaking grease like snail slime.

He wipes his hands on his pants anyway, and they leave no mark. He knew they wouldn’t, intellectually. Tomas is aware that his sensation that his hands dirty everything they touch is mostly metaphorical.

“Let’s go out,” Tomas says.

Marcus looks at him—a rare achievement lately—and raises an eyebrow. “You want to go clubbing?”

“No.”

“Because it’s a Tuesday evening in Utah. I don’t like our odds.”

“Even Utah has bars, Marcus.”

“Are you sure?”

They find a bar. It takes about half an hour to find one that meets their strict criteria—dark, cheap—but once they do, Marcus gets the first round. Tomas slumps into a booth, his head cradled in his hands. The table is sticky and the vinyl seating feels like it comes preemptively covered in sweat. It feels nothing like church. Tomas is not wearing his collar. He’s just a man dressed in black, waiting for his drink.

“Here,” Marcus says, putting down the bottle in front of him. Tomas doesn’t bother looking at the label. He raises his head and drinks.

When he puts it down empty a moment later, Marcus is staring at him, his own bottle half-raised to his mouth. For lack of better ideas, Tomas belches. “You have very bad taste in beer,” he says.

“You’re the one who chugged it,” Marcus replies.

“It wasn’t worth attention.” Tomas slides out of the booth, points to Marcus’ bottle. “Finish that. I’ll be back in a minute.”

When Tomas comes back with two bottles in each hand, Marcus has finished his drink. His face is curiously blank as he accepts Tomas’ offered drink. “We should get some food,” Marcus says, but he drinks and he keeps drinking like drinking is a relief. Tomas follows suit.

It’s pleasant, not thinking. The music is loud and bad, and the booth is small. They don’t talk much, just watch the TV hanging over the bar and drink their beer which Marcus keeps saying tastes like piss, until Tomas tells him to go pick out a better one then, and Marcus comes back to the table with something dark and heavy that sits in Tomas’ stomach like a full dinner. It feels good. It feels very good. It feels like the opposite of the last week, when nothing felt good, and Marcus seems to feel the same way. His cheeks are red. He smiles at nothing. When the next round comes, they toast each other. “Cheers,” Marcus says, and Tomas says back, “Cheers!” and smiles until his cheeks hurt.

When Tomas gets up to go to the bathroom, he nearly stumbles into three different empty tables. “I’m good, I’m good,” he announces no one in particular. “It’s my birthday!”

The couple at the table closest to them, which isn’t very close at all, shouts, “Happy birthday!” and when Tomas comes back from the bathroom, he slides next to Marcus and leans in to whisper-shout in his ear, “It’s not my birthday. I lied.”

Marcus doesn’t say anything in response. And that’s when Tomas realizes that he slid into the same side of the booth as Marcus sits in, and that he leaned in to press his mouth against Marcus’ ear, and that he supports his weight with the hand which rests now on Marcus’ upper thigh, and that Marcus’ arm is stretched out along the seat so that Tomas can full settle against Marcus’ side. And Marcus is not breathing. And his eyes are lidded and dark. And he does not move away. The arm slung over the back of the booth bumps and stays against Tomas’ shoulder.  

_I have thought of kissing my friend, Father._

_What manner of kissing?_

Tomas presses mouth against Marcus’ jaw, in the little hollow underneath his ear, and it smells like sweat and cigarette smoke, and his stubble scrapes Tomas’ lips, and Tomas’ beard must tickle Marcus’ neck, and Tomas can feel Marcus’ mouth drop open, can feel Marcus’ thighs tense. Tomas breaks away and noses where he kissed. “Forgive me,” he murmurs, and brushes his fingertips against Marcus’ bloodied, bruised chin. “Forgive me, Father. For lying.”

Maybe this is the lesser sin. It hardly feels like sin at all.

They stay like that for a long moment, breathing each other’s air, and the air feels thicker than just air. The desert air feels like humidity—hot, wet, heavy. Marcus encircles Tomas with an arm and raises his other hand, trembling, to Tomas’ face. His back of his fingers ghost against Tomas’ cheek. And then his thumb, slowly, so very slowly, draws a cross upon Tomas’ forehead.

Tomas closes his eyes against the feather light weight of Marcus’ touch. The thumb crosses him again, across and down and this time keeps going. Marcus traces down the bridge of Tomas’ nose. It passes the tip. And then there’s nowhere but Tomas’ lips, and Marcus doesn’t press his thumb against them, but Tomas leans forward and that is the same thing. His eyes open as his lips do, as Marcus’ thumb drags his lower lip down. It is the simplest thing in the world to dart out his tongue and watch Marcus’ eyes flutter shut. It is the simplest thing in the world to take the tip of Marcus’ thumb between his teeth.

 

***

 

All the world, the universe, creation, all of it is the hint of wetness between Tomas’ lips and the blunt pressure of his teeth as he bites down, and it is only the paralysis of euphoria, terror, ecstasy that stops Marcus from pulling Tomas against him in the senseless rutting of lust beyond sense. God, please, God help him, Marcus cannot move as Tomas lathes his thumb. “Tomas,” Marcus rasps, low and broken, and he hopes it says, please, don’t do this, please don’t tempt me, please don’t ask me to be strong.

They are so close, so close, close enough that Marcus would barely need to move to kiss Tomas’ beautiful face, his blessed face, looking at Marcus with—what? With trust? With love? Marcus sees what he wants to see. But Tomas looks at Marcus with _something_ and it doesn’t look like hate or fear and Marcus doesn’t know what that means when Tomas must know Marcus’ thoughts.

 _Don’t, don’t, don’t,_ he orders himself, _you aren’t allowed to want him anymore,_ but the weak part of Marcus, and Marcus is so weak, whispers, _but you said you would follow his lead. You swore to God._

Marcus swore to God that he would honor Tomas' wishes and leave Tomas alone.

Tomas does not seem to wish that at the moment.

Marcus pulls his hand back, and Tomas tries to follow. He rests his hand against Tomas’ cheek, and Tomas leans into it. Tomas closes his eyes. He’s never more than one moment away from looking mournful, and he looks it now. “I’m sorry,” Tomas says, his accent heavier with the drink.

“No apologies, love,” Marcus mutters, and Tomas buries his face in Marcus’ hand, his lips to Marcus’ palm.

Marcus feels the words against his hand more than he hears them. “It’s all I see. When I look at you,” Tomas says. He brings his hand, the one that isn’t clasping Marcus’ thigh, too high, too close, and cups Marcus’ hand with it. Marcus doesn’t breathe. Tomas kisses Marcus’ palm. “I can’t forget. I am sorry. I’ve tried so hard.”

Marcus doesn’t know what to say. There’s nothing to say. Everything that was hot before is cold, not iced, not frozen, just lukewarm, just numb. His blood is not blood but water. Tomas opens his eyes, and they are wet with tears. “If there were—maybe—a different memory. Something else that I could see. That I knew was you.”

_Did you really think he’d ever want you?_

“Is that what you want?” Marcus asks through numbed lips.

“No,” Tomas says. “But I’ll take what I can get.”  

Tomas is drunk. Marcus is drunk. They’re both drunk, and this is Marcus' fault. 

When Marcus takes his hand back, Tomas doesn’t let him go. So Marcus shakes Tomas off. “Get up,” Marcus says. And Tomas gets up, and Marcus walks past him, out of the booth, into the bar where suddenly the music is as loud as it was before, and the people on the other side of the building are a dozen chaperones, and Marcus is a piece of shit old man who deserves God’s indifference. “I’m going to take a piss,” he says. “When I get back, we should head back to the house.”

He doesn’t look at Tomas. He doesn’t wait for an answer.

When he gets back, the booth is empty, and Tomas is waiting by the door with his coat on, and his hat is pulled down low, and they don’t look at each other, and they don’t speak, and they don’t touch, not once, as they stagger down the street, far enough apart that they may as well have been alone.  

 


	7. Chapter 7

Tomas falls to his knees and prays for God to send him a vision, to tell him what he must do, and in the morning Tomas wakes up panting and shaking.

He does that a lot these days. He soaks motel beds and trundle beds in cold sweat, hot and freezing at the same time. He'd sleep naked if he slept alone—if clothing can't keep him warm, then at least he can spare himself the laundry—but one bed over is always Marcus. They don't have enough money for two rooms, and why would you need two rooms, and Tomas doesn't want two rooms, but sometimes he'd like to fall apart in the morning unobserved. It's nightmares, mostly. Nightmares interwoven with visions interwoven with memories. Tomas prays to God to help him untangle the strands while Marcus makes hotel coffee that tastes like burnt mud. He leaves the cup on the bedside, for when Tomas is ready to drink it. Some mornings, bad mornings, Marcus wets a washcloth and leaves that for Tomas as well. On the worst mornings, Marcus towels off Tomas's face himself and cradles his head like an infant as he brings a glass of water to his lips. When it's over, when the headache recedes and the shaking stops, Tomas recovers his sense of embarrassment. Marcus doesn't give him space to blush. "You'd do the same for me," Marcus says, as if that were true, as if Marcus would let him. Tomas wonders if Marcus feels like a babysitter. Tomas wonders if Marcus feels like bringing Tomas was an ill-conceived favor.

"We can stay here another day," Marcus says this morning.

"I'm fine," Tomas says.

"Maybe I'm not," he replies conversationally. "I haven't got any leads. Have you?"

Last night, a dream, a house, black sky, no moon, red moon, the moon was a well and someone was falling, fingernails scraping, breaking, the fingernails buried in the sand like seeds that will never grow, the tide comes in and the water is red, Olivia sits on the beach crying while Marcus waded into the ocean. "I don't know," Tomas says. "I don't think so." Just a nightmare, or a vision he can't understand. Same thing. His head pounds.

"Then we'll stay. There's a diner down the road, we'll get a good proper breakfast in you. It's been a while since you threw up anything with some heft."

Tomas laughs, not a lot but enough, and lets Marcus pull him to his feet.

The visions aren't as bad as they were. They're less painful and less helpful. They brought Marcus and Tomas to Andy, and then the family after that, and then the family after that, but the strange lucidity of horror that signaled a vision has been coming less and less. They're going. He'll be a vessel pouring nothing soon. Marcus thinks it's a mercy from God, who led Tomas to where he was needed but would not lead him a quick death. God's got more work for you, Marcus had said. Tomas thinks it's a test he's failing. Every morning he wakes up more rested than when he went to sleep, the relief he feels is blasphemy.

"It's not a sin to feel good," Marcus tells him over breakfast, an indecent pile of pancakes, eggs, and meats. "It's not virtue to suffer for the sake of suffering."

"Are you familiar with Catholicism?" Tomas asks, and Marcus snorts. There’s too much food on their plates, and it all smells too good. He sips his coffee. That tastes too good too.

"You've got too much good work ahead of you for God to drive you to death and madness now.” Marcus crunches into his bacon—he always requests it burnt, and Tomas is always horrified, and Marcus always grins and says, “Then I’ll eat the charred bits and you’ll have the rest, works out fine for everyone.” “He's got me for that."

"For more than that,” Tomas says.

Marcus grimaces as if the sentiment embarrassed him. "I'm the rubbish old sponge you use to scrub the toilet. You've got more than that ahead of you."

It’s weird that Marcus has pancakes, Tomas thinks. Marcus like waffles. He tolerates pancakes. And diners always have waffles, and the kind of runny eggs Marcus likes, and Tomas drinks orange juice, not coffee.

“That’s not true.” He frowns. His head hurts. His head hurts so much.

Marcus raises his eyebrow. “You’ve said the same yourself.”

Tomas rubs his temples. His skull feels like it’s cracking open, like it’s one of the eggs sacrificed to their breakfast. Their breakfast. Tomas doesn’t remember ordering breakfast. He doesn’t remember coming to the diner. He doesn’t remember leaving the motel.

“Where are we?” Tomas rasps, looking around. The diner looks like a diner looks like a diner looks like the dictionary definition of a diner looks like it belongs everywhere and nowhere. He looks back at Marcus who looks like Marcus who looks like Marcus who squints at Tomas like he’s trying to figure out a joke.

“We’re at breakfast,” Marcus says slowly.

“Where?”

“At a diner.”

“Where?” Tomas’ voice rises. The other patrons turn to stare—but wait, there are no other patrons, and no waitress, and now Tomas realizes no cooks or crowds at all, and no windows, and no chairs, except theirs, their booth, alone, in a darkened bar.

And Marcus doesn’t look like Marcus.

“From everything I heard, I thought you’d be easier,” Marcus says, and spears an egg with his fork, and the egg is not an egg. The chick’s blood runs across his plate. “Was it too much conversation? You not one for foreplay? I should have gone with my gut. You should have woke up with my cock shoved in your mouth.” The man who is not Marcus smiles, and brings his fork to lips, and the baby chick impaled on the prongs screams with a human tongue.

“You would have liked that,” the thing who is not and could never be Marcus lies and opens its bloody mouth so wide the jaw cracks loose—

Tomas hits the floor. The couch cushions fall with him. He must have thrashed them loose. He thrashes, when he has nightmares.

Something else hits the floor elsewhere, distant, and then again and again, and by the time Tomas recognizes them as footsteps, Marcus is in the doorway, his fist raised to knock on the frame. Tomas is already on his feet.

“Are you alright?” Marcus asks. Sweaty, tired, dirty, eyes bright and skin pale. This is Marcus. Tomas knows that. This is Marcus. Dreams make him too pretty. Or too ugly. And too predictable. In Tomas’ head, Marcus always does what Tomas wants.

This Marcus does not fly across the room to embrace him and tell him how brave and strong and worthy he is. This Marcus worries distantly, and with half a mind on Oscar upstairs.

Tomas smiles. Not much but enough. “A bad dream.”

Marcus nods. That makes sense. There’s been bad dreams enough in this house this week. He lingers in the doorway as if he will not pass the threshold. “You’ve got an hour before your shift.”

“I’m up.”

“You should rest.”

“Yes.” Tomas wipes his hands over his face. There’s no rest in him. “Let’s get back to work.”

 

***

 

They work. They pray. They eat, when they remember. They sleep, when they can. The last time Marcus fell asleep on the job, a demon slithered into Tomas’ head and wore Marcus’ skin to rape him. It discourages idleness. Doesn’t matter. In this line of work, insomnia is practically a professional skill.

When Marcus’ words falter, and they do so easily now, Tomas steps forward. Marcus doesn’t step back. He’s useless now, he knows that. God tested him and he failed. But he has this idea, this fantasy, that Tomas can take the demon and Marcus can take the blow. Tomas is the exorcist now. Marcus can be the shield.

Mouse can train him, Marcus thinks. Bennett can train him. But they won’t die for him. So Marcus won’t send him away. Marcus is a selfish man. He’ll keep Tomas close, until Tomas won’t have him or Marcus can’t serve him. He hopes it’s the second, and he hopes it kills him. Easier that way. You don’t realize how lonely you were until you stop being lonely, and Marcus doesn’t think he can go back to that. He doesn’t want to. He’s lonely enough now, standing right beside Tomas, and even half the loss is killing him.

He’ll keep working. It’s a plan. It’s something to do while God demands he do something.

 

 

On the seventh day, Marcus puts a pot on to boil and says, “He’s going to die if we don’t do something.”

Tomas forces down the gulp of water Marcus prescribed him and rasps in a voice torn from shouting, “Then we should do something.”

The demon has not budged or flinched, not once in their time in the house. It fears neither Marcus nor Tomas. It taunts them their failures. It steals Jessica’s tongue, Mr. and Mrs. Keane’s tongue, Olivia’s tongue. It calls to Tomas in the lisping Spanish that Marcus barely understand, but makes Tomas’ face flush dark. Marcus does recognize a few words; he’s been called a monster and a faggot in Spanish a few times himself.

Marcus rubs his eyes so hard he sees white. “We could call someone. Bennett, I don’t know. Get in contact with him. Have him send someone else.”

“Is there anyone else?”

“Must be. Probably.”

Tomas finishes his glass of water with a grimace. Marcus sympathizes. The water tastes like illness. Everything in this house does by now. “We can’t leave him. Oscar is our responsibility.”

Tomas is right but Marcus says wearily anyway, “We’re not doing right by him if we can’t help him.”

Tomas is weary too. “I know Gabriel was the first person you lost.” He says it as if he did not knock the air out of Marcus, as if the walls of the room did not press closer and closer, tight as a coffin. Tomas has the audacity to shrug. “Perhaps he will not be the last. But Gabriel did not suffer alone. Oscar will not suffer alone either. We will witness.”

This he says as if it is nothing.

Marcus’ mouth is dry as ash. “Didn’t do Gabriel any good.”

The last week has been hard, and the week before that harder. Tomas seems out of patience. “You gave him strength and comfort to the end,” he says, an accusation. “He was scared and you made him feel brave. There is as much of God in that as any exorcism.” Tomas breaks off, coughing, his ragged throat giving out. Marcus cannot unclench his hands from the counter, cannot relax one single muscle. Tomas hacks something up and spits it into the sink. He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and says, “Oscar needs the man who believed that.”  

“The man who believed that didn’t save Gabriel.” Or Casey, or Angela, or Cindy. Or Andy. How long it has been since Marcus was useful. “Tell his mother what my effort counted for in the end. It doesn’t matter.” Tomas opens his mouth and Marcus says again, harder, “It doesn’t matter.”

Tomas shuts his mouth, but glares as he does so. It’s oddly comforting. There’s something domestic about arguing with Tomas, even about death and demons. Course, Marcus came from a nightmare house, so that might explain it.

Marcus drops the block of ramen into the boiling pot. When Dolores calls to check in, they can say they ate something hot.

“Don’t let it burn,” Tomas says, to Marcus’ surprise. He’d assumed Tomas was fed up speaking to him.

“It’s not going to burn,” Marcus replies.  “It’s water, I can’t burn water.”

“You burned it before.”

“I burned egg, that doesn’t count.”

“You burned egg in the ramen.”

“Well, I didn’t put eggs in this ramen.” Marcus stirs the noodles, which will almost certainly overcook themselves no matter what he does so long as he is the one doing it. But Tomas is worse, he undercooks everything. Why he eats so many salads, probably. Doesn’t need to fuss with cooking.

“Why not? We’ve got some in the fridge.”

Marcus shakes his head. “Cracked one open earlier. They’ve all gone bad.” He snorts. “Dramatically so.”

Halfway through opening the fridge, Tomas freezes. “How?”

“Dead chick in mine.” Marcus grimaces. It’s not the worst thing he’s seen in a haunted house—demons curdle perishables like summer heat and Marcus has been surprised by too many maggots—but he likes chicks. His family kept them. He thinks. A solitary image out of the blur of his childhood: cradling a chick, soft and small in his soft, small hands.

Cradled Gabriel too. Marcus’ hands were cracked and hard by then. He hadn’t been delicate for a long time. He wishes Tomas hadn’t said his name. As if he needs reminders of his failures.

“I had a dream,” Tomas says, and his tone makes Marcus raise his head, “where an egg was a dead chick.” Tomas leans against the counter, his arms crossed, with a look on his face that says he was thinking very hard, very privately, and now he has decided something.

“The nightmare,” Marcus says. Tomas drenched in sweat, staggering to his feet, swaying, shaking. Marcus had held onto the doorframe to stop himself from rushing to his side.

“I wasn’t sure if it was just a dream. I think it was a vision.”

Marcus doesn’t want to ask, but he does anyway. “What else happened in it?”

Tomas looks at him silently. Marcus looks back to the pot. Guilt lives in Marcus’ ribs and tightens them like a vice.

After a moment, Tomas says, almost wistfully, “I thought—after what happened. I thought God would stop sending me them.”

Marcus has prayed that God be gentle with his gifts to Tomas, that God shield him from the ugliness Tomas insists on wading into, but Marcus never wanted Tomas to mourn his visions like this. For this reason. “God loves you, Tomas,” Marcus says. He doesn’t trust himself to look at Tomas. He keeps stirring the noodles. “What was done, that doesn’t change anything. God loves you. He’ll always love you.”

Tomas takes a shaky breath. “I thought God found me unworthy.”

“Never.” Marcus tries to make the word a rock. Solid and sure enough a man might build on it, if he chose.

The kitchen is silent. Marcus can’t remember how long the noodles have been boiling. He tries one and burns his mouth. It’s overcooked. He hears Tomas huff a little laugh. Then Tomas says, serious again, “I know what we can do.”

And Marcus, as a sudden chill sweeps through him, says, “No.”

Dust shakes from the ceiling as Oscar thrashes. It settles on their forms without fuss; they are already so grey.

“I thought I wasn’t unworthy.”

“This isn’t about that.”

“Can we talk about it?” Tomas snaps.

Marcus turns off the heat, his pulse pounding behind his eyes. “What is there to talk about?” he says incredulously. “You can’t—after what happened—”

“It won’t happen again. It can’t.”

He gives Tomas a pleading look. “You can’t know that, you can’t just decide that.”

“I’m not an idiot, Marcus,” Tomas spits so bitterly it makes Marcus sick. “Or as weak as you think I am.”

“I don’t think you’re weak or stupid, Tomas, you’re the greatest man I know!” This, Marcus practically begs, begs Tomas to believe him, because Marcus can see Tomas using Marcus’ opinion of him as a whip for self-flagellation and Marcus cannot seem to wretch it from his hands. Tomas flushes, surprised. “It’s not a matter of you. It’s letting a demon back inside you.”

“To help this man, this victim—”

“So you can martyr yourself from the inside out.” Marcus shakes his head, jerks it more like, as if with violent enough gesture he could cast the though away entirely. “No, love, I can’t let you do that again, not after.”

With mournful eyes, Tomas raises his chin. “I won’t fall for it twice.”

“It’s not about falling for anything.”

“Isn’t it?” Tomas asks. “You say it is not my fault. If it is not my fault, then there is nothing I could have done. Nothing I can do.” He shakes his head. “I don’t believe that. It will not happen again.”

Marcus, voice sounding like some dead thing: “Sometimes you don’t get a say in what happens.”

Tomas does not blink. “Then if it happens again, it happens.” He laughs, horribly. “It can’t make things worse.”

“No, _no,_ ” Marcus hisses, and the vehemence, the sudden fury of it as Marcus lunges forward, leaves Tomas flinching at the closeness, and for a moment, they breathe the same air again—stagnant, stale. Then Marcus staggers back, he pulls himself away just as quick as he came forward, and turns his back to Tomas, and covers his face.

“I can’t let you do this,” Marcus says, begs. “Please don’t do this.”

_I swore to God that I would trust you. That I would follow you. Don’t lead me here._

“I’m not asking permission,” Tomas says, deaf to his prayers. “I’m asking for your help.”

 

***

 

Olivia loves Thanksgiving. She outdoes herself every year, no matter how much or little she has, and she always makes sure Uncle Tomas gets time with Luis who sits right next to him. “No kid tables,” she says. “I always hated the kids table!”

“Me too,” Marcus says, helping himself to a liberal serving of mashed potatoes. “Mind, that’s cause we had a couple hundred boys pounding on each other at the first whiff of food. Kid table was Lord of the Flies.”

“What’s that?” asks Luis who insisted on sitting between Tomas and Marcus, and Tomas had pouted about it, sure, (he’d harbored long fantasies of holding Marcus’ hand under the dining room table) but Marcus is so good with Luis that it’s hard to sulk. Luis loves Marcus already. Kids always love Marcus. Kids and cats. And Marcus loves them right back.

If Tomas had not loved Marcus already, he could have loved him for this, cheerfully explaining a garbled version of British literature to Luis who hung on his every word.

Marcus catches Tomas’ eye over Luis’ head and winks.

(Marcus pleads with just his eyes and Tomas wants to say _yes yes alright I won’t and I’m sorry to have worried you_ , but instead Tomas takes a deep breath and crouches by Oscar’s frothing, snarling body, and he says, “Oscar, I am coming to help you,” and behind him Marcus with a shaking voice begins to pray.)

The thought hits like his head against the floor. Tomas says, “This isn’t real.”

Olivia smiles as she cuts her food. “But don’t you wish it was? You men of God.” She looks at Marcus knowingly as he leans back in his chair. “Hermano, you can have it all.”

“You offer a lie.” 

“Everything’s a lie,” Marcus says, in the same soft tone he used for Luis, for Harper, for Tomas when Tomas is weak. Or tired. Or sleepy. Funny, that it occurs to Tomas in this moment, in the midst of this lie, but perhaps that’s not the voice Marcus uses for children because they are children, but because Marcus loves children, and Marcus respects children. Maybe that is the tone Marcus uses for love.  

This Marcus is a lie, of course, this dinner, this room, but demons lie with the truth. Marcus had told Tomas that once.

Tomas stands up. The chair scraps back. Demons and their visions, Tomas reflects, are sonically unpleasant. Unpleasant to every sense really. An aesthetic nightmare. No wonder they must cling to trickery. “Where is Oscar?”

Luis says, “No one wanted him. He’s happier now.”

Olivia says, “Sit down, Tomas. There’s no need to be so dramatic.”

Marcus asks, “What did you think would happen at the bar? Hmm? Were you going to wank me off under the table and call us even?”

“No,” Tomas whispers. And then, louder, almost annoyed, “Stop.”

“What did you do?” Luis asks with big eyes.

“Luis, honey, your tio is a pervert,” Olivia says. “Married to God and hard for anyone else.”

“Has he always been a pervert, Mama?”

“Oh yes. You should have listened to his confessions when he was your age, Luis. They made the devil blush.”

Tomas astonishes himself by rolling his eyes. “Oh shut up.” Amazing how repetitive demons are once they’ve tormented you enough. They cannot say anything to him that he has not said to himself but worse, uglier and angrier. They cannot show him anything worse than the real Marcus standing like a stranger on the other side of the room, unwilling to meet Tomas’ eyes.

“If you won’t tell me where Oscar is,” Tomas says, turning from the false feast, “I’ll find him myself.”

“You say that so proudly,” Marcus calls after him. “Anyone ever mentioned that’s your sin as well?”

Tomas leaves through the kitchen door and walks out onto a dusty highway. Red rocks loom in the distance. The sky stretches like a lover in their bed, a perfect dream of blue.  It’s desolate as only the American West can be, as if the road was made for no one but you.

If this was Tomas’ head, here is what he would see: Marcus, feet up on the dashboard as he urges Tomas to speed through the empty roads of North Dakota, a different West but still bleak and beautiful as Eden after the Fall, and the radio singing under its breath. Marcus told him about the monks of the prairie who live out this way, and how he once stayed with them for two months after a particularly hard case that nearly killed him and the victim alike. Marcus grinned. He had a strange idea which of his stories were funny. He’d gone blind but—Marcus assured him—just for a bit.

_Psychosomatic. Like my eyes were just tired of seeing. The monks put me out in their garden, and I yanked up half their flower bed trying to help with the weeding. They didn’t ask much from me after that. Don’t think they had much use for a blind invalid who wouldn’t talk, but that’s fine. Monkhood isn’t about being useful. There was one, Brother Stephen, he tried to get me to join them, he said I was the only decent conversation he could get, bit of a prick thing to say considering I was still mute, but by that point my sight was back and Bennett had sent me my next case._

Tomas asked him if he would have stayed. If he had wished to remain blind.

_I’d hung around long enough. ‘I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.’ Heh. That sounded like a threat, at the time._

Tomas had told him that he wished Marcus could have stayed. That Marcus sounded happy there. Tomas did not tell him that his voice was beautiful.

_Yeah. Well._

They drove. Marcus looked out the window, and on those flat empty roads when they were the only people in the world, Tomas could spare a thousand glances at him. The dust that coated everything made the sunlight solid in the air. It wreathed Marcus in gold. He smiled, quietly.

 _The first thing I saw when I saw anew was Dakota in winter. Snow everywhere and wind like you wouldn’t believe whipping everything about. First snowfall of the season come early. I didn’t notice at first. All I saw those days was white, like the static on old tellys. You ever seen that? You too young for that? Don’t give me that look, baby face. All I saw was white and then that morning I saw black shapes moving through the white, almost like—I don’t know. Shadow puppets, maybe. I thought I was going mad. Then I saw. A flock of monks in black, playing together in the snow. That was my first sight. That was a sight worth seeing_.

Out of the past and into another man’s head, Tomas walks down the highway towards the only other figure. A man stands shirtless, his head tilted to the sky. His hands are covered in dirt. On the side of the road, a plain wooden cross drive into the dirt.

“Hello, Oscar,” Tomas calls to a fellow traveler lost in the desert. “I’m here to help.”

 

***

 

Marcus keeps vigil as Oscar convulses, as Tomas lies still as death, as both men without stirring begin to weep. Blood runs from Oscar’s eyes. Marcus hates himself for the relief he feels that Tomas cries only water. He is compromised, heart and soul. He knows why the exorcism has gone nowhere before this. Marcus has tried so hard to kneel before this stranger and love him, but all he has worried about is Tomas.

Oscar is not a handsome man. He is too tired for that, too inanimate in his own skin. Andy was a handsome man and look what the demon did to him. There is no allure to the possessed. There is no sacred halo of suffering. Just mucus, pus, blood, corruption. Marcus washes Oscar’s face and wrings out the washcloth until the water goes from pink to grey to clear, and tries to love this man. To love him because God loves Him. This man in his empty house, unknown and stranded so far from home.

If Marcus was possessed, his exorcist would find him in a house like this. If Marcus is lucky. More likely he’d be found in a motel room, leave a mess behind for a poor cleaning woman who doesn’t deserve to glimpse horror six hours into her minimum wage shift. Marcus’ exorcist would sift through Marcus’ belongings for something to grasp onto, but Marcus traveled light. His Bible, his tapes, his clove cigarettes hidden in the bottom of his backpack where Tomas won’t find them. Could someone build a life from that?

 _This man is alone and God loves him_ , Marcus tries. It feels true. _This man is alone and he deserves God’s love._ Yes, that jump feels true as well. _This man will always deserve God’s love. There is nothing he can do to become unworthy of it._ Marcus slips his hand in Oscar’s. After a moment of hesitation, of searching his own motives, he slips his other hand in Tomas’. _This man is beloved. This man is forgiven. Even the demon is beloved. Even the demon is forgiven._

“Beloved, let us love one another,” Marcus whispers to the silent room, “because love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” Oscar is not handsome but beautiful as the human soul. Tomas is not beautiful but awesome as an angel. And the demon, it too was an angel once, and beloved by God. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” Marcus is the least of them in this room. And a voice as gentle as rainfall, gentle as the newborn down of a peeping chick, says, _and as you do to the least of these my brothers, Marcus, you did it unto me_.  

Marcus head jerks up. Old habit. The voice of God always seemed like it ought to come from on high, instead of murmured in his ear. God kneels with him.

_Say the words, My child._

His mouth opens. He is not the one who opened it. Numb lips form sounds his ears are slow to recognize. “Son of the morning, banished from grace. Profane thing, ashes on the earth.”

He does not say it to Oscar. He does not say it to the demon.

_My son, My son, My beloved son. Say the words and believe them._

“You are relieved, outcast.” Marcus’ voice cracks. “Fallen angel—fallen angel—”

He cannot speak. His throat will not open, any more than his fists will. He clutches Oscar’s and Tomas’ hands like a drowning man.

Marcus has led the one he loves most into suffering unprepared. And the air seems to chuckle, a sound of infinite sadness. God, the sound suggests, knows how that feels. Then God is silent. God is waiting. Marcus cannot breathe. Marcus is unworthy.

Then one hand twitches. And twitches again, and then holds him tight, and Marcus is so lost, he cannot know which hand is which, whether it is Tomas or Oscar, which man in this moment loves him, which man in this moment he loves, he cannot even tell which hand is his own. But he feels it, God thank You, he feels it, like a fire, like a good meal, like a long drive with a good friend, like opening his already open eyes to see the husbands of God dance in fresh snow. He feels love like a firm grasp, and unable to differentiate the hands, he is forced by the sweetest tyranny to love Oscar and to love Tomas and to love himself. If only for this moment, but with all his heart.

_Fallen angel, you are loved._

He hears the words. They don’t need to be said. He says them anyway, and believes them.  The sweetest commandment. _I have no other gods but You, and You demand I love._

And Tomas wakes, as Tomas said he would. And Oscar wakes, as Tomas said he would. And Marcus cannot let them go. Will not let them go. And both men, weary beyond the endurance of suffering and giddy with the love of God, hold Marcus as well. Three lost souls in an empty house. Their exhausted laughter is prayer.

 

 

Oscar needs a doctor. His time possessed had thrashed his body so soundly that he cannot stand. But Oscar is undocumented and impoverished and he does not want to be touched by uncaring people in a white room that smells like nothing. Marcus calls Dolores. She thanks God and His two hands. “I will take care of him,” Dolores says.

“He’s in a bad way,” Marcus says.

“That is why I will take care of him.”

When Marcus comes back to the bedroom, Tomas has Oscar propped up in bed, helping him drink driblets of water. “Dolores from your church will take you in,” Marcus says in Spanish.

Oscar murmurs and coughs and tries again. “I don’t know her.”

Marcus squats down next to him, clasps a hand on his shoulder. “She knows you. She’s been praying for you all this time.”

“She’s a good woman,” Tomas says.

“She’ll force food on you like a goose for slaughter.”

Oscar doesn’t smile but he doesn’t look more nervous either, which has to count as a win. He nods and closes his eyes and doesn’t open them. He’ll be asleep more than he’s awake for the next week, Marcus imagines. Demons are a bit like fever. After a certain point, the best recovery is rest and time.

His sleep leaves Marcus and Tomas alone, on either side of the saved man.

“How are you?” Tomas asks quietly.

Marcus snorts. “I should be asking you.”

Tomas smiles wanly. “I’ll say if you will.”

They sit together in silence, but a warm silence. The silence of a bedroom where someone peacefully sleeps. _I heard God_ , Marcus thinks of saying. _I wish I could kiss you,_ Marcus thinks as well. Neither seems as important as what Marcus decides on. “I miss you.”

Tomas whispers, “I miss you too.”

They meet each other’s eyes. They hold their gaze. It is a pleasure to look at Tomas and to be looked at by him. It is a holy joy to ignore shame. Their smiles are bruised, but they are smiles. This could be enough. If this is what God will grant, good work and good friendship, then that is feast enough. If this is as good as it gets, it’s more than Marcus ever thought he could have. Pride, lust, gluttony to have wanted more. If they can be brothers, let them be brothers. In his head, Marcus takes his dreams of kisses, of embraces, of passion and groans and husbands, and tucks them into an empty bottle, and throws the bottle out to sea. Let someone else find it. This could be enough.

 

***

 

Here is a hotel room. Every hotel room. They all look the same, the way Marcus and Tomas travel, just variations on cleanliness. This is a clean one, not spectacular, not horrifying. Note the comforter, how it feels like plastic, but note the water as well, which runs clear and hot. This is a good hotel. The lightbulbs don't hum. Note the warm light. Note how it looks like firelight against the stucco walls.

They had left because that’s what they do, because it felt good to do so, to leave Oscar and Dolores to each other’s care, and to open the wide map before them. “Where to next?” Marcus had asked, half-joking, half-not, and Tomas, terrified by the faith in his words, had said, “I’ll pray on it.” Send me a vision, God, Tomas had prayed, and here he was, in the best hotel in the world.

And then, in the way of dreams, suddenly the center appears, and it is Marcus, lying on his stomach on the bed. There is only one bed, and he's kicked the plastic comforter off. The white sheets tangle around him. Nothing else does.

And in the way of dreams, Tomas is there now as well, and he watches himself as though through a camera at the foot of the bed as he sits naked against the headboard. He watches himself watch Marcus. His hand rests in the dip between Marcus’ shoulders, and he can see his thumb sweeping over the bumps of the spine. Marcus' back is freckled and scarred and bruised. Tomas knows about the first two. The last one is strange, a typical part of the ever changing topography of Marcus' abused skin, but they're oddly shaped. Not like the usual wounds Marcus collects like medals. Tomas cannot place them, until he remembers that they are naked in bed together, and his palm is tracing the knobby curve of Marcus' spine, and Marcus is sighing and burying his face deeper into Tomas' thigh. Tomas bruised Marcus' back with kisses. And he knows, in the way of dreams, the bruises traverse that wondrous land of Marcus' pale body, and if Tomas were to pull the sheets away, he could trace the path of his desperate mouth from Marcus' feet on up, all the way to the spot underneath Marcus' left ear where Tomas cried as he kissed with the sheer relief of kissing and Marcus murmured, yes, love, yes. Marcus bruises so easily, always. Tomas had wanted him to bloom with love. Tomas had wanted his kisses to ring Marcus' neck like a collar. And Marcus, underneath him, whispering, yes, love, yes, please, yes.

This is a dream, Tomas in the bed says, as he watches himself from the foot of the bed.

Without opening his eyes, Marcus kisses Tomas' thigh, and the Tomas that watches from the foot of the bed, Tomas the camera, Tomas the voyeur, burns with love for the Tomas in the bed that he, at least, can feel Marcus' lips. Feels real to me, Marcus who is a dream says.

Visions always do, says Tomas in the bed as he looks Tomas the bodiless ghost in the eye.

Tomas wakes, tangled in sheets and nothing else, except that isn't true because he's tangled in his clothes, he's tangled in his collar, he's tangled in arms, freckled arms, scarred arms, and the smell of Marcus who smells so good, so fucking good, that Tomas doesn't even think when he presses his face against Marcus' chest, and the arms don't hesitate to wrap him tighter, sturdy around his shoulders and Marcus, Marcus in the flesh, Marcus in his bed, says, "I've got you, love, I've got you," as Tomas shakes and aches for him to call him “love” again.

He thinks I was having a nightmare, Tomas realizes. He is right, Tomas decides. Tomas had prayed to God for guidance out from the desert, and God had replied that Jesus resisted the devil for forty days and Moses had kept the faith for forty years. Tomas will just have to wander a little longer. Nightmares don't have to be nightmares in the moment to be nightmares. They just have to feel like nightmares when you wake up, and realize what you will never have.

Except they are together now, in a hotel, any hotel, on the road together in a location that matters only insomuch as they are together, and Marcus is in Tomas's bed, and Tomas is in Marcus' arms, and as long as Tomas is hurting, Marcus will hold him, and Tomas is hurting because Marcus will stop holding him.

Tomas gathers the scraps of his strength in the face of Marcus' heat, his arms, his gentle murmurs in Tomas' ears that it's alright, it's alright, he's safe; Tomas imagines tying them together into some sad shawl, and slipping that shawl over his skin, so that Marcus did not touch Tomas but the shawl of rags of Tomas' vow, Tomas' discipline, Tomas' repentance, Tomas' friendship, Tomas' love. And when Tomas imagines that, imagines Marcus no longer presses directly against him but that his touch comes through the buffer of the man Tomas tries to be, Tomas manages to push away.

The moment Tomas begins to move back, Marcus' arms are gone, as Tomas knew they would be. Marcus rations his touches these days; he pulls away, but hovers nearby. Tomas rubs some sense into his head and soaks in Marcus’ proximity.

I'm sorry," Marcus says, inexplicably. "You were crying."

Tomas feels the wetness of his own face. He is tired of apologies. So he says, "Thank you.”

Marcus looks away. Tomas tries to feel nothing about that. "Couldn't leave you looking so miserable, looking like a kicked puppy in your sleep."

"Thank you," Tomas says again. "You helped."

Marcus does not seem to know what to say to that. He smiles instead, not a proper one but a twisting of one side of his mouth, the suggestion of humor doing nothing to erase the worries in his eyes. He pats his own knee, and Tomas realizes that this gesture is him covering up how he was about to reach again for Tomas. "Was it a vision?" Marcus asks as if afraid of the answer. “What you saw?”

What he saw: Tomas looks himself in the eye, and Marcus presses his head against Tomas' thigh, but Tomas cannot feel it, Tomas can only watch as in another life the man he loves presses against the man he is not, and the strange realization comes over him that in this other life, this glimpse he invented or discovered or was offered, he witnessed the happiest moment of either man's life. The happiest moment of their lives so far.

That is what he saw, after he prayed to God.

"I don't think so," Tomas says. But he cannot keep the question from his voice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay all my estimates are finalized, the next chapter is _absolutely_ the last one, and my goal is to have it up before the end of January. Thank you as always for your comments, your pained, pained comments.


	8. Chapter 8

They do laundry.

It’s been a while, too long since the last time they had clean clothes, and while Marcus is fine with scrubbing briefs and socks in motel sinks, Tomas has higher standards. “And so should you,” Tomas says pointedly as he pulls into the parking lot of a laundromat near the Four Corners, and Marcus laughs and says, “It’s monkish. Ascetic. God’s very proud.” It’s an old argument, one as threadbare and soft as Marcus’ shirts, one they’ve been having since Marcus commandeered Tomas’ apartment without ever making demands on his washer and dryer. Tomas fusses and insists. Marcus teases and relents. It’s a favorite song of theirs. And it’s nice to sing it again.

This is normal, Tomas thinks cautiously. This is what normal looks like now.

Marcus catches him staring and smiles with just his mouth.

While Tomas turns the last of his cash into quarters, Marcus makes phone calls. Bennett’s doing well, judging by the annoyance on Marcus’ face. “Yeah, well, easy for you to say,” Marcus is saying as Tomas jangles back to the little booth by the window of the laundromat where Marcus, who never met a chair he couldn’t abuse, sprawls with his legs out on the bench. His eyes flicker to Tomas briefly. “Doesn’t matter. You got work for us?” And then, “That’s what I said, isn’t it.”

Tomas is good at knowing when he’s being discussed. “What do you need washed?” he says to Marcus, who grimaces, reaches under the table, and tosses Tomas his backpack. Everything, then. Tomas is doing about the same. He can’t remember the last time his clothes hadn’t smelt of sweat and death.

It must be a sign of progress that Tomas cares about how much he reeks. He’s working his way up the hierarchy of needs.

Tomas upturns Marcus’ bag on top of a washer, picks out his Bible, his tape player, and his pack of cigarettes he thinks Tomas doesn’t know about, and pushes everything else into the spin cycle. There’s nothing worse washing can do to Marcus’ clothes than living hasn’t already done. He thinks about sorting his own clothes and ends up tossing them with Marcus’. They don’t have enough clothes to overstuff a washer. Exorcists carry their heavy lives lightly.

Marcus’ bible feels warm in his hands. It always does on the rare occasions Tomas has handled it. The leather of the cover is so worn it feels soft as velvet, the embossing of the words indistinguishable by touch. Tomas’ abuela had cherished a bible like this, a book that had been read too often and too passionately to ever lie flat. It looked like faith made solid. He’d wanted that bible after she died, but no one knew where it was when he finally, finally flew down ( _she died alone waiting for you_ , said the first demon that had stolen Marcus’ skin, and what a mixed blessing that the first demon has so recently been overshadowed).

Holding Marcus’ bible, so similar, so familiar, Tomas has the sudden, irrational thought that this is that missing bible. The book had gone to one who had needed it most, and now God had brought it back to his life.

Feeling like he’s cracking open a diary, albeit one Marcus has never minded handing him before, Tomas opens the bible. Birds erupt from the pages. The columns of texts become forests, black and looming. Blue jays and cardinals flutter over Adam who names them, Cain and Abel fight underneath a field of roses. God breaks Job and Marcus draws children, gangly limbed and smiling or twisted and bleeding, and then Marcus crosses them out or labels them or stops halfway through. Most of the portraits he draws never get finished: bodies without faces, faces without eyes, skeletons sketched in and the skin left out. Marcus draws from life and leaves life undone. Even the book is left undone—some pages redacted, some removed altogether.

Bennett’s right, technically. This is defacement (difficult to say it’s not, especially considering Leviticus 18:22, over which Marcus has drawn a blushingly accurate erect penis). But Tomas cannot imagine God would mind, or that the Adversary would take strength from this. There is no evil in the honest work of love. The Sermon on the Mount peeks out between the boughs of a willow, which sweeps across two pages, along a river that undulates from margin to margin. Tomas traces its curve down the fine paper as if he could follow it to the sea. The gentle water susurrates the same words Jesus does.

Marcus’ hand is present everywhere in this book, every pen stroke and every blank space, but here by Psalm 103 Marcus has drawn himself. Tomas would recognize his hand anywhere, even without the gun barrel tattoo Marcus stick-and-poked himself. Marcus drew his hand clasped to another, perhaps in prayer, but the hand he holds doesn’t look like his, and Tomas can’t pretend not to wonder whose it is. It could be his. Tomas can’t tell. How well do you really know the back of your hand? Marcus and Tomas used to pray like this, hand in hand like at any moment the music might start and draw them into a holy waltz. But maybe this isn’t prayer. Just clasping. Two hands, holding each other. It looks like a man’s hand. Marcus isn’t a priest anymore. He had touched his lips on the island and smiled to himself; he had shielded the name “Peter” from the demon’s mouth. Marcus can do as he likes, as he loves. He’s earned that and more.

Tomas’ dreams are worn as soft as Marcus’ bible. Neither belong to him.

Across the room, Marcus laughs, surprising as a whip crack. Something’s changed in the booth. Marcus is sitting feet on the ground, hunched forward and in as if protecting the phone pressed to his ear, and he is smiling, beaming, saying, “All that in just your first game? You’ll be at the Olympics next year.” Pause, and Marcus replies, “Nah, they’ll start them early, just for you. Happens all the time for the best athletes.”

Probably not Bennett, Tomas thinks, but he can’t imagine who. He comes back, puts the bible and the tape player down on the table in front of Marcus who looks almost sheepish as he smiles at Tomas. “No, I never played,” Marcus says to the phone. “No one likes baseball but Americans.” The person on the other end of the phone says something, and Marcus throws his head back and laughs again.

Tomas raises his eyebrow as he sits opposite him, and Marcus says to the phone, “One sec, duck.” He tilts the receiver from his mouth. “Bennett got me in contact with Mouse. Mouse is still with Andy’s kids. Harper’s telling me about her new baseball team. Sorry, sorry—her _softball_ team,” he adds with good natured grumbling clearly not directed at Tomas. “What’s the difference, then?”

Marcus falls silent as Harper explains, except for the occasional noise of acknowledgement and a few earnest _wow_ s. He’s thrumming, shredding a napkin to down fluff as he listens to her, this almost silent child who is now talking his ear off about her softball team, her new school, how Verity is teaching her how to make a robot. Tomas wants to rip the phone from Marcus’ hands and beg her to forgive him for what he nearly did to her; this is because Tomas is selfish. Instead, Tomas folds his arms on the table and rests his head in them, and Marcus, perhaps without thinking, ruffles his hair. Then draws his hand back. Tomas closes his eyes. Their legs are not touching, but they’re close enough that Tomas imagines he can feel the heat of them. When Marcus shifts, their feet bump together.

Marcus laughs again and says, “Pull the other one.”

This is normal. The new normal. This is their new good times. It looks almost like their old good times. _I miss you_ , Marcus had said, and Tomas had replied, _I miss you too,_ and the words had sounded like a closing door. And you know what they say God does when that happens.

The new open window, he thinks, is friendship and brotherhood, but Tomas is still working out the exact metaphor. All that he can think at the moment is Marcus on the other side of the door. _As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us._

“I don’t know,” Marcus says, and the new tone draws Tomas out of his reverie. Mirth’s been replaced. Marcus nearly stammers. “It’s not exactly safe. Keeping in contact with us.” Marcus pauses. “Not this number, no, we got through a lot of phones.” Marcus pauses again and Tomas raises his head to see his brow knit together as he chews his thumbnail. Marcus needs to fiddle; Tomas has thought more than once about offering up his own hands for the fiddling, but again, he’s not thinking those things anymore, except in how he’s not thinking of them. After all, he prayed for normality and so God shut the door.  

“Alright.” Marcus draws out the word, a cautious concession. “I can’t—yeah, I’ll call. Yeah, alright.”

Harper squeals so hard even Tomas winces.

They say their goodbyes, Marcus offering a “talk to you later,” like he’s baffled by the concept, and when he hangs up, he looks at the phone as if he doesn’t understand how it got into his hand.

“You’re popular,” Tomas says. He can’t help smiling.

Marcus laughs as if the sound embarrasses him. He slinks lower in his seat, his head cradled in his hand. He’s half a teen, just texted by their crush, and half a kicked dog, just offered a strange hand. “It’s, ah. Not the usual way. You know. How it’s normally goes.”

Tomas thinks of Mouse, the awkward and unsaid history there. He thinks of his lessons, Marcus tucking his bleeding heart back into his chest and telling Tomas that to be an exorcist is to be alone. “You don’t linger in people’s lives.”

“No point outstaying my welcome. Bet she won’t even know who’s calling in a week. Some old weirdo ringing her up." Marcus says it like a joke. It's got the cadence of a joke, at least. None of the humor of one. “

_Good things should not shock you._ Tomas wants to grab Marcus’ face like this is an exorcism, wants to tie Marcus down to a bed and scream a while about love. _You deserve better than that._ But they don’t touch each other like that anymore. They’ve made peace with each other, and now they pray several feet apart.

They hadn’t touched each other like that before either. They had touched each other, and left the why unsaid. _Tell me what you want_ , the demon had commanded, and that’s when Tomas should have known that this was not Marcus, because Marcus and Tomas had always, always taken refuge in silence.

 

 

 

They head to a motel early by their standards, which means the sun is just setting and neither of them are on the verge of collapsing. They don't have anywhere to be, and on a different night, on an older kind of night, they would have saved the money and slept off the side of the road in the truck. But they don't have their truck anymore, and Mouse's just doesn't seem as comfortable, and Bennett's promised them funds and a new case soon. Until then, wait and see.

"Unless you've got a better plan," Marcus says. The question of visions is implicit.

"No," Tomas says, and Marcus nods as he relaxes.

When Marcus comes back from check-in with two key cards for two rooms, Tomas smiles and takes his and says nothing of it. There was a time when he would have rejoiced at  privacy. He pretends this is still that time. Tomas will fall asleep to the sound of his own breaths; he will stand naked in a shower knowing Marcus has never stood naked there as well. A reprieve from the false intimacy of a shared space.

"You want to grab dinner?" Marcus asks.

"No, thank you," Tomas says. "I'm going to turn in early."

"You should eat."

"I'll eat later. I'm not hungry now."

"Fair enough."

They're so polite to each other now. It gives Tomas a headache. He grabs his bag from the backseat and only just stops himself from slamming the door.

Marcus shoves his hands in his pockets and leans against the driver's door. He's close, so close. The slanting twilight paints him softly. Tomas tries not to look. "Well," Marcus says. "Good night, then."

Tomas takes a step forward without thinking, without letting himself think, and it's a small step that makes the space between them all the smaller, and when Marcus' eyes widen, Tomas thinks again, _I miss you_ , and he smacks Marcus on the arm. Pats him. Something between the two. Where aggression meets the platonic. This is the touch of men—fleeting and violent. All his boyhood with one arm flung around his friends' necks, while the other hand beat them. Slapping, ruffling, pinching, punching, shoving, hugging, embracing, practicing, laughing. Always laughing, and always letting go. Tomas lets go. Doesn't even hold onto Marcus in the first place. Just claps his arm and says, "Good night," like some jovial asshole thinking about nothing at all, least of all how it would be such an easy impossible thing to take one more small step forward.

Tomas steps back. What he sees as he turns away, is Marcus touching where Tomas touched him.

_We were happy,_ Tomas thinks as he climbs the stairs to the motel's second floor. _In my vision—my dream—my fantasy—we were happy. And God was happy that we were happy. How could God not have been happy? I wanted God to be happy, so I told myself God was happy. I make God what I want Him to be. When I woke up from the exorcism, Marcus was holding my hand and crying, and I thought that meant something. But he was holding Oscar's hand too. It means Marcus is a good man. The Mother Superior told me to love as Christ loves and mourned her friend who lived next door. Marcus saved a child’s life again and again and shakes at the idea that she wishes to keep him in her life. God wants us lonely and indiscriminate. God wants us to love everyone and no one. Marcus loves me as much as he loves Oscar, and he’ll never see Oscar again._

The air smells like motel chlorine and the evening sky, nearly night, is so beautiful that Tomas lingers outside his room and watches the lights come on across the flat land. The desert turns a rich blue-black. God is the expanse. God is the limitless sky. God is not a man leaning against a truck down below, his own little star of light as his lighter flashes and his cigarette burns. _Remember that_ , Tomas thinks.

The motel room looks like a motel room, like every motel he's been in for the last half year, except instead of two beds, there's one, and instead of company, there's air. God is everywhere, Tomas reminds himself, but sometimes he makes himself more known than other. All the Gideons in the world can't make God feel present in an America's Best Value Inn. Is this the room he saw when he dreamed? Is this just a room? Tomas had noticed nothing except himself and Marcus.

Tomas tugs off his collar and tosses it onto the table, trying not to make a metaphor of the whole thing. He could use a shower. He could use a clean set of clothing. He’s wearing his last dirty outfit, unwashed since you can’t be naked in a laundromat at two in the afternoon. He strips naked in the middle of the room now, because that’s what you can do in a room alone, and promises himself as he climbs exhausted into bed that he’ll shower in a minute.

What he needs is something to think about, something that’s not demons or Marcus or where the two intersect. The trouble is, there isn’t a road in the world that doesn’t lead him where he wants to go, and Tomas has spent so long thinking on Marcus, living with Marcus, working with Marcus, dreaming on Marcus, that his mind can’t help but fall in the rut. Even now, naked and sprawled facedown in bed, his strongest thought is how proud he should be for how little he is thinking about Marcus.

( _Dream Marcus in sheets and nothing else, his face pressed against Tomas’ legs, and his lips, kissing with his eyes closed as if not even sleep could stop him—_ )

Tomas gets up, beats himself numb with a cold shower, and dresses for bed in a workout shirt and pajama pants that smell blessedly like dryer sheets and a pair of neon green socks. It’s the least erotically charged outfit he can come up with on short notice. His head still throbs in time with his pulse, and despite the ice water, his blood still runs hot. He’s antsy, has been antsy all day with nowhere to go and nothing to do but think about what he shouldn’t think about. Things like _how many times can one man be tempted by the same thing before he learns his lesson_ and _if he’s making the same mistake again and again, is it a mistake of starting or stopping._

He still has the romance he picked up from the garage sale a while back. He’s barely started it. Marcus had stolen it while Tomas was driving and wouldn’t stop dramatically reciting it until Tomas pulled over and begged him to please not enunciate "turgid" that emphatically while Tomas was trying to merge.

There. Hardly connected to Marcus at all.

Tomas reaches in his bag and pulls out _Riding At Midnight,_ which has held itself together well considering the publishers had printed it with the kind of paper that yellows within a week and glue that merely suggests stickiness. The cover features a shirtless man in jeans and a cowboy hat, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. In the background, a black horse rears underneath the tagline, _Passion rides on horseback._

“Is this a book about fucking a horse?” Marcus had asked the first time he saw it.

“It was fifty cents,” Tomas had said in his defense. “And I don’t think so.”

“You shouldn’t be uncertain about it.”

Marcus had read it all, though mercifully he’d started doing so silently about fifty pages in when he got invested. He’d read it at arm’s length as he read since Marcus believes he doesn’t need reading glasses if he squints hard enough. Maybe that’s why he draws in his bible, Tomas thinks. No point worrying about covering up the words if he couldn’t read them in an emergency anyway. He’s been saying the words since he was twelve. Why should he need the text?

“Here, take them, just take them,” Tomas had said, thrusting his glasses case at Marcus who took it only to toss it in the backseat. And later, that evening or maybe the next day, Tomas had come back from the gas station bathroom to see Marcus standing by the pump wearing Tomas’ frames, frowning at his commandeered romance novel. Tomas had frozen right there in the middle of the parking lot until an SUV honked at him and Marcus’ head shot up and he’d seen Tomas staring and he blushed. He yanked off the glasses, which had slipped halfway down his nose, the same one he’d tweak for Harper and smile at her so sweetly Tomas would feel as if he were spying on a stranger.

“You look good,” Tomas had said, more honestly than he’d meant.

Marcus had just said, “Course I do, I always look good,” but he hadn’t put them back on, and Tomas did not offer them again on the grounds that he now had an ulterior motive for doing so. Honesty could have cleared up the ethics of the matter, but since Tomas could not figure out a way to tell his friend, his brother, that the sight of him wearing Tomas’ things made him so hard he’d had to contort himself in the passenger seat so Marcus would not notice, Tomas kept his mouth shut and his glasses and his shirts and his socks and his thoughts to himself.

Tomas takes out his reading glasses, slides them onto his own nose, thinks about Marcus’ fingers pushing up his frames when they start to slip too low. There’s nothing illicit about that thought, surely. Not compared to other thoughts he’s had, where Marcus fucks him from behind over his desk at St. Anthony’s, a desk that no longer existed by the time Tomas thought to fanaticize about it, until they’re both soaked in sweat, absolutely dripping, and Tomas is still wearing his reading glasses which are nearly falling off his face, and then Marcus pulls out and turns him around and almost falls to his knees to take him into his mouth, but then he pauses, and kisses Tomas on the mouth, and brushes a bead of sweat off the tip of Tomas’ nose before he pushes Tomas’ glasses back up, secure.

His head falls back against the headboard with a thump and a wince. He does not touch himself, though his body stirs. He’s sworn off of that, made a late night promise to God that he wouldn’t, not again, never again, and in return God had sent him visions of mana in the wilderness.

He ought to pray for guidance, but he’s sick of holy words. He’s used them too much as weapons.

So instead, Tomas opens _Riding at Midnight._ Its cracked spine falls open where it always has—to the dramatic first kiss, hero Jackson Wyoming dipping his new lover Kitty against the desert sunset. And where Marcus has drawn in charcoal Tomas laughing as he drives, bent nearly double over the wheel, his eyes squeezed shut in mirth. Tomas has never seen himself so happy.

He studies his own face, drawn by someone who memorized it. Someone so pleased by its mirth that he had to remember it the way that he remembered things, in charcoal on paper belonging already to words of love. 

There’s this joke about a flood, though presumably not The Flood, and a priest at his altar. A man runs up and says, Father, Father, we have to go, come get on my boat. And the priest says, no, no need. The Lord will provide and save me. And the rain keeps falling, and the water keeps riding, and this time a life raft paddles in through the door, and the sailors onboard say, Father, Father, we have to go, come with us before the storm gets worse. And the priest says, no need, don’t worry. The Lord will provide. And the rain falls still harder, and the water rises still higher until the priest is clinging to the crucifix to stay dry. And a helicopter hovers outside where the giant stained glass windows used to be before the storm shattered them, and someone gets on a megaphone and shouts over the din, Father, Father, we have to go. If you stay you’ll drown. And the priest says, nonsense, never. The Lord will provide. And the helicopter leaves, and the priest drowns.

When he gets to heaven, the priest asks God, why didn’t you save me? I had such faith. And God replies, what do you mean? I sent you two boats and a goddamn helicopter.

There’s a knock on the door, and it’s good Tomas is decent, as decent as he can be with his mouth dry and his hands numb, heart pounding repentance against his chest, because Marcus doesn’t wait before coming in. He’s got two plastic bags in hand, half steamed up, and instantly Tomas’ motel room smells like Indian food.

“It’s later,” Marcus says. “I brought food.”

“Later?” Tomas repeats blankly.

Marcus pulls out the takeout and says, “When you said you’d eat. Don’t worry.” Marcus winks at him. “I got it mild.”

And here is what Tomas should say: something about how Tomas likes spice, how _he_ can actually handle spice, and Marcus will say something like, what does that mean, and Tomas will remind him which one of them was the one who got horribly sick in Texas because he got ambitious about hot sauce, and Marcus will something like about how it wasn’t the hot sauce, it was food poisoning, and Tomas will say, sure sure, and then ask then why it is that Marcus bursts into a sweat just looking at pepper. And then the food will be on the table, and they’ll eat without ever once bumping, and when they’re done, Tomas will stay in his room and Marcus will go to his.

Tomas closes his book and uses his fucking head for once. “How’d you get in?” Tomas asks. And then, when Marcus opens his mouth to lie, Tomas says, “Both keys are for this room.” And when Marcus doesn’t respond, Tomas says, “You only got one room.”

Marcus, head bowed, finishes unpacking the food.

“Where are you sleeping?” Tomas says.

“It doesn’t matter,” Marcus says.

“In the truck? In a park? Or are you not sleeping at all?” Horror lurches in his stomach as he sits up. “Were you going to leave me?”

Instead of saying no, Marcus sets the plastic forks on the table like he’s prepping a dinner party. Tomas wants to slap them out of his hand. “Not unless I need to. Thought you might want some space at least for a night. Didn’t seem worth wasting the money for two.”

Tomas thinks, almost, _how much he much hate me that he cannot stand to sleep near me._ But he doesn’t. He might have once, even earlier this evening, but Tomas can’t imagine how or why he could think that. In his mind, Marcus hunches in the booth, curled around the voice of a little girl telling him about her day. He said goodbye to her and here she’s back again; Marcus looks like this is a miracle on par with the resurrection. _He thinks he’s doing me a favor._

 “You think you’re doing me a favor,” Tomas says. What a strange pleasure, to think something and say it. Tomas tries it again, just to see how it tastes on the tongue. “You think your gift is going away. Look at me, Marcus.”

And Marcus’ head twitches like he wants to disobey. Then, he looks.

All those times before, when Marcus and Tomas looked at each other and just _knew_ , those magically holy moments when it felt like God had given them access to the language before Babel, when all the world simply understood—had they ever understood? Had they ever, in even their moments of closest connection, looked at each other and thought the same thing? When everything is left unsaid, did they only assume they had got it right?

Because in this moment, Marcus looks as if he is afraid Tomas hates him. And Tomas doesn't know what Marcus could have ever seen in his face if he can think that.  

When Tomas was a teenager in the cloistered black box, burning with lust and terrified of the flames, Father Antonio commanded him to confess. “No need to say why you did it,” he said whenever Tomas wavered into explanation. “Reasons are excuses. Name the sin and bury it.”

"I love you," Tomas says. The truth feels sweet on his tongue, the sweetest weight he’s ever choked. “As a man. Not a friend or a brother.”

Marcus stands ramrod still and pale as that day in Chicago when Tomas let a demon crawl inside of him and Marcus staggered to Tomas’ door bloodied and bloodless. "Don't say that," Marcus whispers. "Don't fucking—no."

The words are a wound, possibly fatal. He has so often looked at Marcus and known, _known,_ that Marcus found him wanting and unwanted. So all the demon had needed to do was say Tomas was wanted. That he was good. He wore Marcus' face and told Tomas that it was good that he was here, and Tomas had fallen to his knees. _I miss you_ , Marcus had breathed, and Tomas should have kissed him then, if only so that he might have kissed Marcus once. But he continues, he mourns, "It's true. And I’m sorry. I'm sorry that it upsets you. I'm sorry that I've—I've disappointed you." Marcus makes a keening noise in his throat like Tomas has stabbed him. Tomas takes a deep breath in lieu of crying. "But I'm not sorry I love you. I'm not, Marcus. I'm sorry, but I'm not."

"Stop fucking apologizing," Marcus practically snarls, but not at Tomas, not at anyone Tomas can discern. He shivers across the room, and Tomas wants to sweep him up in his arms. He does not look at Tomas, but looks everywhere else, like a wild animal in a cage startled into fear. His eyes dart about, and his hands ball into fists he releases and reclenches. It is the look of a man trying to bite back violence.

Tomas wonders briefly if he should be scared of him. He could not be even if his life depended on it.

"Then I won't," Tomas says. And because despite everything it was a joy to say the words, to free the battered bird at last from the wretched cage, he says again, "I love you."

"No, you don't," says Marcus, hopeless as a drowning man. "You don't, Tomas. You're just—you get sentimental, you, you, you're kind, you're too fucking nice, no, Tomas, no, no, you don't."

Tomas takes a step forward and Marcus stiffens, stills to utter immobility, except for his breathing, just short of hyperventilation, and Tomas takes another step forward, and Marcus shakes as though every muscle in his body tenses. "Don't tell me what I feel," Tomas says.

Marcus says nothing, does nothing, until Tomas reaches for his hands, pure white and clenched, and Marcus flinches away. The movement is so suddenly, so fierce, that Tomas flinches himself. Shame scuttles across Marcus’ face. "I need to go," he says. "I'm going to go." But he takes no move, and this time when Tomas reaches out again, he holds himself still as a prey animal as Tomas brushes his fingers against the back of his hand. They're close now. They've been close before. They used to be close all the time, and they would whispers prayers that the other would breathe deep so that their words lived on in the other person's lungs and blessed them with every pump of the bellows. Tomas can hardly feel Marcus' hand, he's so nervous. His own pulse pounds in his fingertips and ears and throat.

"Te amo," Tomas prays.

And Marcus shakes his head.

And Tomas says, "Sí."

Marcus takes a shuddering, inadequate breath through his nose, and says, "Please don't. Not after."

"After what?"

"You know."

"I don't."

Marcus begs with eyes alone.

Tomas says, "Tell me."

"I can't—please—not now—not—you said when you look at me, it's all you—" Marcus clenches his jaw, grinds his teeth, looks away. In another hotel, in another time, Tomas snapped off his words like this trying to give shape to his shame. Tomas does know what he wished Marcus did then. He takes his hand from Marcus, watches Marcus crumple at the loss, and watches Marcus stiffen anew when Tomas brings his hand to Marcus' cheek. The stubble scraps so sweetly against Tomas' fingers. He can feel the iron tension of Marcus' jaw, and he runs his thumb along the muscle, feels it twitch under his touch.

Marcus surrenders and buries his face in Tomas' palm. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I fucking hurt you, I hurt you, I’m sorry, love, forgive me—”

“You did nothing, nothing,” Tomas whispers, his voice cracking. Marcus’ tears bring out his own. He does not know who he is weeping for. “Mea culpa, mine, me.”

“My face,” Marcus pleads, lips hot against Tomas’ hand, tears hotter. “My face, it wore my face, and I brought you—I should have warned you—”

"Warned me what, Marcus?" Tomas asks, though he fears he knows the answer, fears the explanation that forms in his mind.

Marcus squeezes his eyes shut, and tears roll fat and heavy down his cheeks. Tomas cups his face with both hands, pulls them still closer together. Even now with Marcus weeping and shaking, it is blessing to hold him. He tilts Marcus' head down and Marcus lets him, puts up no fight, makes no sound but a gentle sob as Tomas presses his lips to Marcus' brow. He smells like Tomas's missing shampoo. The thought of Marcus smelling like him makes him ache. "Confess," Tomas commands softly. Marcus shivers against his words.

Marcus' hands dangle by his sides like dead things. If Tomas gave him the smallest push, Marcus would be flat on his back.

"I should have told you what they do," Marcus says flatly.

"I already knew," Tomas says. "Casey and Jessica." They've never discussed it since Tomas started his training. Tomas had always assumed Marcus was too disappointed in the event to think it bore repeating—an unfair judgment, unfair and untrue. It was easier to make Marcus disappointed than to be disappointed in himself.

Marcus shakes his head, almost. Twitches it to the side like he wants to look away, but Tomas holds his face fast. He presses their foreheads together. Marcus has nowhere to run. "No one told me," Marcus says. "Father Sean, he didn't tell me, and why would he? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. I don't know, Tomas, I can't trust what I remember. You remember the face and you forget the rest. Forget who was wearing the face. I don't know, I can't remember. And others—they said I wanted it, that's why the demons did it, and I can't say they were wrong, but I think they must have been. If someone else told me what I told myself, I'd tell them that some monster got them twisted up, that they didn't deserve it, that they didn't ask for it, and it sounds true for them, but it isn't the same. When it's you. Not you. When it's me. It's true for you."

Tomas' vision blurs until he cannot see Marcus as they press together nose to nose, and Tomas croaks, "Oh Marcus.” Marcus brings his hands up as though they weigh ten thousand pounds and ghosts them up Tomas' shirt as if he is afraid to touch. Until Tomas exhales, "Mi cariño, mi amor, dime por favor," and Marcus grasps at Tomas—a drowning man who found something to hold.

"My fucking face," Marcus says. "It wore my face."

"I'm glad," Tomas says, "I was glad, I was glad, I wanted it. I wish it had been you."

"No, no—" Marcus spits, and Tomas silences him with a word.

“Hush,” Tomas says, "hush. I do, that's what I wish."

"It hurt you, it hurt you, and it looked like me."

"It didn't hurt," Tomas says. "Not until I knew it wasn't you."

"It raped you, Tomas." This, Marcus pleads as if he requires forgiveness. His eyes are wild, and as if he had forgotten until now Tomas' grasp upon him, his grasp upon Tomas, he starts the contact and tries to jerk away. And Tomas holds him fast, not that he needs to; Marcus’ fists are still balled in Tomas’ shirt. "Let me go, Tomas, let me—" But Tomas doesn't. “Please, love, please don’t look at me,” Marcus sobs, truly sobs. “You said it was all you see.”

And Tomas presses his lips against Marcus’ cheeks and kisses his tears. Benediction, salty and sweet.

“I thought I disgusted you,” Tomas says softly against Marcus’ cheek, and Marcus, so eager to comfort the broken who aren’t himself, swears, “Never. Tomas, never.”

“I thought you thought I was weak.”

“Never _, never_.”

“I wanted so badly for you to touch me.”

Marcus takes a shuddering breath. His ragged exhale tickles Tomas’ cheek. “The demon made you—”

“No.” Tomas kisses his cheek again, just because he can, because his cheek is there and his lips are willing and Marcus’ head falls as if it weighs too much to hold, so Tomas kisses his cheekbones as well, kisses his temples and the bridge of his nose and the impossibly soft skin of his eyelids. He holds Marcus’ face between his hands and rains kisses upon him like the sprinkle of holy water. “The demon was a lie. My desire wasn’t. It isn’t.”

Marcus hisses though his teeth, but his hands move, sliding as though he cannot bear to take them away from Tomas for a second, until he wraps an arm around his shoulder, an arm around his waist. There’s modest air between them. Tomas coaxes Marcus flush, and together they gasp.

"I never hoped. I stopped hoping," Marcus croaks, his forehead pressed against Tomas'. "You deserve more than this. More than a broken down old man."

"Don't talk that way," Tomas says. "I'll not hear you insult the man I love."

A whimper tears out of Marcus' lips, and Tomas cannot stand to hear that either, not from this, not from love, so he presses their lips together and tries to swallow Marcus' doubt. _God, God, God,_ Tomas thinks, _all those years of seminary and now I have finally found you. You are the taste of my love’s lips._  

Tomas pulls back, just enough to whisper, “Do you love me too?”

And Marcus says, “Christ, Tomas, did I not say it? I love you, I love you. It terrifies me how much I love you.”

“Good, good, me too,” Tomas says, relieved to be on the same page, and kisses Marcus again with a hunger that terrifies as well. Vast wondrous things are terrifying. God is a pillar of fire from the sky, lighting the way out of Egypt. The angels say be not afraid.

 

 

On the bed, the one bed, their bed, Tomas straddles Marcus’ hips as he unbuttons his shirt with fumbling fingers. Marcus runs his hands up Tomas’s thighs and blushes under Tomas’ stare. “You’re beautiful,” Tomas says, and Marcus doesn’t dare to deny it. Tomas would not let the words pass his lips. “May I?” Tomas asks, reaching for Marcus’ belt, and Marcus laughs as if it doesn’t need to be asked before he says, “Yes, God, yes.” And Tomas slides down Marcus’ body as he takes off his pants, and there between Marcus’ bare legs, long and leaned and scarred and perfect, Tomas asks, “May I?” and Marcus swallows and opens his mouth and when no words come out, Tomas waits until Marcus nods. And when Tomas nuzzles against Marcus’ clothed cock, Marcus sobs exquisitely, and Tomas is filled with light. Like his blood is champagne and his sins forgiven.

When Tomas starts to pull Marcus from his briefs, Marcus mumbles, “You don’t need to do that,” as he strokes Tomas’s hair like Tomas might leave any moment.

“I have dreamed of this,” Tomas replies and kisses the tip of Marcus’ cock with every bit of reverence with which he kisses his bible.

He can’t imagine God would be angered by that. There is no evil in the honest work of love.

He takes Marcus into his mouth as best he can—he’s never done this before, has only once received this act himself, but the noises wrung from Marcus’ mouth make Tomas’ mouth water and his hips grind against the mattress.

Then Tomas gags, and the hand on his head tugs him back. And Marcus is bringing him up, bringing their mouths back together as their legs entwine—Marcus’ bare, Tomas’ still clothed. “Come on, love,” Marcus murmurs, one hand brushing through Tomas’ hair as the other lies flat against his stomach, just above the waistband of his sweatpants. “Let me take care of you.”

Tomas kisses him in answer, and grabs Marcus’ hand on his stomach, and slides it lower. Together they grasp Tomas’ cock, and when Tomas gasps into Marcus’ mouth, it finally hits him—good good God so good thank you thank You God thank you, he is making love to the man he loves and the man he loves loves him back. Marcus pauses—“Are you alright?”—and Tomas nods and nods—says, “Call me love again”—and throws his head back Marcus takes them both in hand—whispering “love, love, oh love” like Hail Marys—and strokes them together.

He wants to pin Marcus down and ride him until his legs give out. He wants Marcus to lie over him and fuck him face to face. He wants to be on all fours and come cock untouched while Marcus takes from behind and drives out every false memory, every misstep. The demon copies Marcus’ body and got him all wrong. There is nothing in this bed of hell, nothing, nothing.

_God is in me,_ Tomas had told the demon, and the demon had replied, _Did God fuck you too?_ Tomas wants to say _yes, yes, yes, He is incardinate and infinite and He sent me my husband._

Tomas comes with his face buried in Marcus’ neck. Marcus comes with his face buried in Tomas’ hair. They could be buried in this bed. They breathe and shiver as one.

When Marcus asks too hesitantly, “Was that good for you?” Tomas brings Marcus’ hand to his mouth and sucks his fingers clean one by one.

Marcus watches through half-lidded eyes, dark as the desert night and as full of stars. He hooks a leg over Tomas, hooks his foot behind Tomas’ ankle. “Imagine our dinner’s gone cold.”

Tomas laughs, giggles to be more accurate, and Marcus giggles with him and into him. They sound drunk. They are, and kiss again, and get drunker still. Tomas’ hands roam Marcus’ body, the scars he knew and didn’t, the freckles constellated down his back, the softness of his belly and above, the rhythm of his ribs. And Marcus undresses him, a question at every step, and Tomas says yes, please, yes, yes, yes, mi amor, yes. I want this. Give me what I want.

And Marcus, ever generous, ever sacrificing, gives and gives and apologizes for takes until Tomas stops his mouth once more, and they begin again.

 

 

A desert road, from nowhere to nowhere. The track of a boulder. It is not in the same place today as it was yesterday. It will be in a new place tomorrow. Somewhere nearby there is a woman with a knife. Her wife sings a lullaby for the child that has not arrived. The boulder is coming for them. It will turn them into a smear in its track. Tomas does not know how he knows that. Just that he does. The end of the world is not yet here and a family needs help—

Tomas does not jerk awake. Instead, the vision ends and he opens his eyes. Nevertheless, there is a hand stroking his face at once, a familiar hand, a familiar comfort. “Are you okay?” Marcus whispers. The hotel room is pitch black, and they are tangled in each other.

“Yes,” Tomas says with complete honesty. He turns his head and kisses Marcus’ thumb, just because he can. “Sorry for waking you.”

“I was awake.”

Tomas raises an eyebrow he knows Marcus cannot see. “I didn’t tire you out, old man?”

Marcus pinches his bottom. Tomas will deny that he yelped. “Rude,” he says primly just to hear Marcus laugh. “Go to sleep.”

Marcus hums, not agreement or disagreement, rests his head against Tomas’ chest, and Tomas rolls onto his back and takes Marcus with him so that Marcus ends up cradled in Tomas’ arms. Tomas delights in the weight of him with every breath. “I can hear you worry,” Tomas murmurs.

“I’m scared this is a dream,” Marcus confesses, his mouth pressed to Tomas’ heart.

“It isn’t,” says Tomas, who has considered it. “You were never so beautiful in fiction.”

After a long silence, a sacred silence, Tomas raising up Marcus with every shared breath, Marcus says, “Well, you would know,” so dubiously that Tomas has to laugh, and Marcus laughs, and Tomas almost says, _the demons never made me laugh,_ but decides to save that thought for the morning as the laughter peters off, and Marcus stills and stills some more and grows heavier still until Marcus sinks down into him, and breathes with Tomas’ lungs, and turns his blood to wine, and makes a torch of his heart for all of the angels to follow, and it’s possible that Tomas has drifted off to sleep now himself, that he is dreaming at last, but there are truths and truths and lifeboats and helicopters, demons, exorcists, a family in need, and Marcus so close against him that Tomas cannot tell whose body is which, and Tomas decides that deciphering the holiest mysteries of the universe can also wait until morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for joining me on this unexpectedly long journey. I appreciate y'all so much for such wonderful feedback in such a small fandom, and I hope you enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed writing it.

**Author's Note:**

> watch me be deeply embarrassed by this lengthy baring of my id over on [my tumblr](http://andhumanslovedstories.tumblr.com/)


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